I know that I can come across as looking somewhat grouchy at times but I do make conscious efforts not to be. I try not to be grumpy but I often fail.
I was so spectacularly unsuccessful in my efforts that there was an establishment in North London where I was known as The Grinch to everyone there who knew me. I was told that if someone asked, “Has the Grinch been in?” people would either answer “Yes” or “No” - never, “Who?”.
My face, when expressionless, looks grumpy no matter how I am actually feeling. This was first brought home to me about 40 years ago when I was playing in a pro/am cricket match to raise money as part of a Middlesex and England cricketer’s, benefit year.
There were about 2,000 spectators and we had been fielding for about an hour when, between overs, the beneficiary came over to speak to me.
“Are you enjoying this?” he asked.
“Yes, very much.”
“Then bloody well look like it.”
There is a colloquial term for this condition and that is “Resting Bitch Face”. As the name implies, the term is used with a gender bias towards women but it applies, I’m told, to both men and women.
When I am grumpy, it is usually people and particularly the things they say that make me feel tetchy and it’s my way of coping with irritability that often makes me appear sullen.
I’ve moaned about some irritating phrases that people use in an earlier post and I don’t want to repeat myself but…..
As I passed by the shelves of toothpaste in a supermarket a couple of months ago, I remembered that I had a dental appointment at eleven thirty. I needed to know the time but I had come out without my watch and had left my phone charging in the car. There are no clocks on the walls and nor are there in any other supermarket I’ve ever been in. I wonder why that is.
Perhaps it is for the same reason that you can never see a clock in a casino. Casinos don’t want gamblers to be aware of the passage of time and do all kinds of things in order to stop punters from being aware of it.
I was approaching a young lady who was studying shampoo bottles and I could see that she was wearing a watch.
“Could you tell me the time please?” I asked, very politely. She raised her wrist.
“Yeah, it’s like, eleven,” she told me.
“Like eleven? What’s that? Ten to eleven; a quarter past eleven? Eleven o’clock?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Yeah what?” I knew I sounded petulant but I was stuck in that mode. “What - is - the - time - please? I need to know.”
Unsurprisingly, she sounded and looked grumpy when she eventually told me that it was, “like five past eleven.”
Using “like” in that way is a slang interjection or, as it may sometimes be called, a linguistic filler. Other linguistic fillers include, “so”, “um” and “you know”.
I think it’s interesting that even though the use of “like” in that way has been around for quite a long time, it is really only teenagers and people in their early twenties who use it.
Teenagers seem to say “like” a lot because it's an easy and convenient filler for sentences in which they are getting lost. It gives them time to think what to say. Then, it just seems to become a habit as was shown by the woman in the supermarket.
In a post I put up more than ten years ago, I wrote about the time I was at a friend’s house and during the evening, their daughter Skyped them from America where she was studying at university. I couldn’t avoid hearing the entire conversation.
“How are you?” her Dad asked.
“I’m like so stressed at the moment. Like everything’s happening, like all at once.”
I listened in awe as she used the word “like” 32 times in an 8 minute 25 second conversation during which her father had spoken for some of the time. That number includes the time that she used the word correctly when she said, “It’s yellow but not like a taxi.”
It appears to be something that people grow out of, thank goodness.
People using the verb “get” instead of “have” when making a request irritates me a lot. Again, this seems to be a tendency in speech that mainly afflicts the speech of young people.
I first became aware I had had enough of it some thirty years ago when, one evening, I was on bar duty at my cricket club. “No, you can’t,” I said to the lad who had answered my question as to what he’d like to drink by saying, “Can I get a coke please”.
“No, you can’t get it. I’ll get it and you pay for it. That’s the way it works,” I informed him. I don’t think he realised that he was being gently chided.
It seems that young people are using Americanisms more and more now. I suppose that must be caused by social media. “I could care less” said when the person means the exact opposite of that is a perfect example.
Some Americanisms are so different in the way we understand the words involved that they could lead to all kinds of misunderstandings. If someone in the UK tried to justify an act of careless driving by saying, “Sorry, I was pissed,” it would be reasonable for them to be arrested on the spot.
Without being immediately followed by the word “off”, someone who just said that they were pissed, would be admitting to being drunk and not to being annoyed or angry as an American would be saying.
I hate to hear that someone has “gotten” something. The past participle of the verb “to get” is “got”. Gotten is a horrible, ugly Americanism.
I was on the phone renewing my motor insurance when I was asked if I would confirm my address.
“Yes, I will.” I waited and after about 5 seconds, the young man said, “Go on then.”
“I can’t confirm it until you tell me what you think it is,” I told him. That misuse of the word “confirm” started in America.
What he meant to say was, “Will you please verify that this is the correct address,” and then tell me what he thought it was. Or, he could have said, “May I have your address please?”
When I told him my address, he asked, “How are you spelling Wavendon?”. I resisted the strong urge to say. “Correctly”.
The other day, a young Milton Keynes traffic warden, in answer to my question about parking for blue badge holders, answered by saying, “Badge holders have to pay here anyways.” What a stupid messed up word. Guess where it comes from.
I nearly walked out of a restaurant a few months ago because of the behavioural and linguistic quirks of our waitress. We had been sitting at our table for about 10 minutes and as is my wont, I was telling a very amusing story and the group was enthralled. I was about to deliver the hysterically funny punchline when the waitress approached our table and immediately said, “Are you ready to order?” and by doing so, cut me off in mid flow. The moment was lost.
Later, when any of our group gave her their order, she responded with, “No worries,” time after time. That was irritating. When she put my plate down, she said, “Enjoy!”. She was in no position to be giving me orders.
Later, one of the others in our group asked her for her name.
“That would be Ellen.”
“But for what?” I asked.
She stared at me, blankly.
I was probably looking fairly grumpy and feeling guilty, I overtipped.
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