Playing Catch-Up (Waggishly)

Feb 3 2010

All of the above leaves me in the irritating position of playing catch up before I’ve even begun. Fortunately there was no word limit or minimum on this challenge, so catching up with this is even easier than catching up with David Cameron’s bike in a car full of his papers.

I’m sure I will eventually work the word of the day in more subtly than this, but a challenge is always a little artful at first, so I won’t try too hard. Today’s word was “waggishly” anyway, which means any attempt to do this earnestly and without taking the piss would be against the spirit of the word.

In a few years the word waggishly will refer to behaviour befitting a sporting personality’s female partner, so I implore everyone to enjoy the word in its original meaning. Erm. Whatever that was. It’s already becoming something of a pejorative epithet, in the sense that if you called someone a bit of a wag, you are almost certainly suggesting that his or her attempts at humour were likely – at some point – to result in them being roundly kicked in the head (perhaps figuratively, perhaps not). In this sense I know lots of waggish people. The kind of people who are the first to send round an email joking about a recent disaster in which 72,000 people have just died in distressingly painful ways, or about a series of child-flayings that they thought was sooo funny.*

These are normally people you don’t know very well. This leads to a vicious circle. You want to kill them because you don’t know them – we have a tendency to forgive our real friends for any coarse offence, because we like them. But the reason these people are *not* our friends, is because every time they open their mouths you want to wedge a canister of compressed air into their stupid grinning mouths and say “smile you son of a bitch” as you blow the top half of their bodies into fleshy fragments.

Which would probably put a stop to any burgeoning friendship. At least for a while.

Hmm. Possibly waggish is already taking on connotations of similarities to sporting personalities’ partners. Or possibility I’m just in a foul mood. You decide.

S.

* this does not suggest that sick jokes can't be funny. It's just these ones never are.