It's a whole new vocabulary
"RENTED dog of a political conspiracy … cockroach that has entered the cabinet … bosses who have been the pillar of racist apartheid repression … political toddler … Helen Zille's garden boys …" A shrill new vibrancy has entered our political discourse. Have we heard anything like it before?
"Capitalist lackeys … Yankee imperialist running dogs … bean soup tigers …"
Yes, it was Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution in China. "A revolution is not a dinner party … All reactionaries are paper tigers … In waking a tiger, use a long stick …" Magnificent stuff!
Chairman Julius has added a sparkle to our political vocabulary, a new dimension. He heralds our own cultural revolution. The internet will be a-Twitter with his sayings. Google will leap to bring us his store of profundities. No need for a Little Red Book.
Chairman Mao: "People like me sound like a lot of big cannons."
Chairman Julius: "Boom-boom!"
Roll on the cultural revolution.
Naming rights
AN INDIGNANT Johannesburg newspaper columnist complains about the way a woman is expected to take the surname of her husband when she marries. Why should she? She's not his property. She has her own name. This patrilineal thing has no place in today's world.
But then what name should she use? The name she grew up with? (One shrinks from using that frightfully sexist and old-fashioned term "maiden name"). But that name she got from her father. And he got it from his father. The whole thing is patrilineal.
Try going through her mother's line and her pre-marriage name (or maiden name) she got from her father. And he from his father.
The whole thing's still patrilineal, there's no escaping it. Most distressing. Perhaps modern girls, when they marry, should take it all the way back and just call themselves Eve. But then there's all that business about Adam's rib – it's male dominance orientated, the nearest thing to patrilineality.
Distressing indeed. There's no way out. But at least it gives a modern gal a topic for a newspaper column.
Balgowan High
THERE'S much jubilation in Michaelhouse circles at Patrick Lambie's debut as a rugby Springbok, the school's first.
It prompts a reader who calls himself Barrie to ask how, when you're first introduced to a fellow, you're to tell whether he went to Michaelhouse.
No need to worry, says Barrie. If he did, very soon he'll tell you.
Student protest
A DISTURBING sidelight to this week's massive protest in London against the increase in tuition fees for university students was the crudity and total lack of wit in the placards they were carrying. The vacuity was repeated in many of the impromptu interviews conducted by television reporters.
Students should surely give a better account of themselves than this.
A FINANCIAL fundi supplies an update on current terminology around the stock exchanges of the world:
· Bull market - A random market movement causing an investor to mistake himself for a financial genius.
· Value investing - The art of buying low and selling lower.
· P/E ratio - The percentage of investors wetting their pants as the market keeps crashing.
· Broker - What my broker has made me.
· Standard & Poor - Your life in a nutshell.
· Stock analyst -- Idiot who just downgraded your stock.
· Stock split - When your ex-wife and her lawyer split your assets equally between themselves.
· Financial planner - A guy whose phone has been disconnected.
· Market correction - The day after you buy stocks.
· Cash flow - The movement your money makes as it disappears down the plughole.
· Yahoo - What you yell after selling it to some poor sucker for R1 500 per share.
· Profit - An archaic word no longer in use.
Tailpiece
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Last word
Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.
GRAHAM LINSCOTT
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