WHO is this e-mail from? The writer says he is going to “FB” me in the evening. What? My nether regions begin to twitch.
Happily, it turns out to be a former colleague from 25 years ago who wants to chat on Facebook. Ah, FB. So glad it wasn’t someone intent on pulverising the tip of their Doc Martens with a soft part of my anatomy.
New acronyms, words and even phrases are appearing all the time. Take drivers who weave all over the road. If they have had a few bevvies, they are said to be intoxicated. But, if it is because they are reading or sending messages on their mobiles, they are now intexticated.
Another new one, unfriend, is the word of the year. It’s when you delete someone from your list of friends on Facebook or Bebo. They are no longer your online friend because you have unfriended them. Get it?
They have lists every few years of new words and phrases that have made it into the English language. Recently inserted are retail elephant, auto dentist and late plate.
A retail elephant is a business that dominates or monopolises an area. So the Lewis Crofters is the retail elephant of Island Road in Stornoway and the Cearns Shop is the retail elephant of, er, the Cearns. An auto dentist is someone who fixes dents on cars. Of course.
And a late plate is a train running behind time? Nope, it is a dish served coolly to a person who returns from the Carlton Bar, or some such fine establishment, well after the evening meal has been served.
In Gaelic, the process for integrating a new word or phrase is slightly different. New words and combinations that have never been used in a school or in a fank on a Saturday afternoon can be firmly installed in the Gaels’ consciousness by 9am on Monday.
If anchormen Donald Morrison and James Macdonald use a word on the 7.30am Gaelic news show, that’s all it takes. The power these people have is terrifying.
Even medical conditions can suddenly make it into our lexicon. Take thymestic syndrome, for example. This is when someone says they can forgive but they cannot forget – literally. Such is their power of recall about everything that they spend their lives thinking about silly little things that the rest of us forget in a day or two.
It is an actual medical condition. As a Maciver, I should really suffer from this terrible malady because our clan motto is Nunquam Obliviscar – I Will Never Forget. If only that were true. I can’t even remember why I brought this up.
Oh yes, new words. Like baggravation. That is something you suffer from when you fly from Glasgow to Stornoway, for example, and you realise that your bags are not on the carousel because the handlers at Glasgow could not be bothered as they were on a tea break.
In extreme circumstances, a bad bout of baggravation can go on for days when, as happened to a member of the Gaelic mafia travelling to London, a holdall containing two black puddings, 6lb of gigot – and, for all I know, a horse’s head – ended up in Italy.
However, it never, ever happens on the Stornoway-Glasgow route. And that is because Roddy Macleod and the guys at Flybe in Stornoway are just so very, very professional. They are all so polite and helpful, too. What an asset everyone in that office is to the airline.
And did I mention they are all very professional? Good. Because they are. Very.
Meanwhile, I need a new word for a rare medical condition that has wrecked the life of my good friend George Gawk Campbell. He is suffering from a puzzling phobia that is not in any medical books. Yet.
He had a letter delivered and, like all of us, he looked for clues about the sender.
No address on the back. It was just a white window envelope with a second-class stamp. That worried George.
Individuals do not send window envelopes. So, despite his recent efforts, it was not a love letter. Only businesses, he reasoned, send those envelopes. That is so an invoice, for example, can be folded so the recipient’s address is visible.
The crofter, oil worker and Labour Party activist from Back put the unopened envelope high up on a shelf and began to agonise over who would be demanding cash. If he opened it, he would be morally obliged to pay it, he decided. But who sent it?
The postmark was unclear. It wasn’t the council or the taxman, as they have brown identifiable envelopes. Must be a local company. Oh heck.
After a few days, the strain got to poor George. He stopped going for a pint. He stayed in, fretting.
Then, the other morning, at 3am, he snapped. Bolting upright in bed, he realised he had to end his torment. He paced the floor for a while then, pouring with sweat, he grabbed the envelope and ripped it open.
It was a shock demand, all right. It was a note asking him to fill in a survey about which party he was going to vote for at the next elections. It was signed by our SNP MP and MSP Angus MacNeil and Alasdair Allan respectively.
How ironic the SNP pair had, through no fault of their own, made George Gawk suffer the worst few days of his life. Don’t laugh, but George concedes he may have an extreme fear of . . . window envelopes. How else do you explain what happened?
My researches have found details of the condition known as defenestraphobia, an irrational fear of windows, but nowhere is the variety of the ailment associated with stationery mentioned in medical texts or learned papers. So we have to invent a term. Gawkenvelopophobia, perhaps?
To those of us who know him well, that George Gawk is an enigma pushing the boundaries of medical science is really no surprise at all.
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