Life’s not fair, but neither is torturing innocents

We all know it – well, at least all of us older than four and with more than three intact brain cells. Oh, and of course eco-Nazis don’t know it, nor do those invisible, noxious wraiths who formulate nanny state laws. But the overwhelming majority of the world’s population knows that life is not fair; that justice is seldom if ever done and that politicians cannot be trusted to do any good for anyone except themselves.

So, because life is not fair, we cannot blame people for where they were born, what kind of hair they have or what kind of noises they utter when trying to communicate. We cannot blame them for having heads shaped like the specimen’s in the Natural History Museum’s paleontology exhibits concerning Neanderthal Man or Homo Habilis -no more than we can blame evolution for occasionally causing a time warp resulting in 21^st century humans cohabiting this planet with creatures from the dim recesses of time.

But that does NOT mean we have to accept things. Just as there is no valid argument to force me to accept that it is OK to have criminals among us, so there is no argument to force me to accept something that fills me with revulsion. It’s called “taste” or “opinion” or “preference” and we all have it. Now you can be a white-livered wimp and pretend that you don’t care, or you can irritate someone else somewhere by stating what you like and don’t like. This, for instance, is my blog, and I am about to write about things that grate on my nerves. If you don’t want to hear about it, I suggest you close this browser window now and we can stay friends. Or we can allow each other to have a gripe about something we may or may not agree about.

Now I have very sensitive ears. Oh, loud noises are fine. After all, I was in the army and on one memorable ten-day long occasion fired something like 2 000 rounds of live 7.62mm ammunition at targets outside Pretoria, and the experience did not leave me deaf. I have stood within two metres of a 35mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft gun firing non-stop for ten minutes. As a child I made my own gunpowder. I played with fireworks when parents still knew that stupid children are better off blowing themselves up than breeding later on. Hell, I can even stand it when someone drags his or her finger nails down a writing board… I even did it myself occasionally as a means of silencing noisy students without using my vocal cords or right arm. But when it comes to the sounds we make when speaking my ears are preternaturally sensitive.

Look, it doesn’t go with nationalities, OK? I grew up among people who could make English sound like the grating of a bale of barbed wire being dragged across a tin roof. I had school friends who uttered words like “cat” so that they rhymed with “bet”. I didn’t throttle them, or beat them to shuddering piles of jellied mess – but I would have loved to! And no amount of repeated exposure to the same sounds has changed my revulsion. So imagine the 12 hours of aural agony I suffered when I had to spend a night in Hamilton airport in New Zealand, the country where vowels are flattened to microscopic thinness. I squirmed in paroxysms of revulsion when newsreaders on South African television stations spoke of “PROHjeks” instead of “projects”, “Tronsvol” instead of “Transvaal” or pronounced the name of the town Uitenhage “Youtenhague” instead of “Eightenhage” (with a hard “g” like the “-ch” in “loch” or Bach. That is unforgiveable in a country where most English-speakers can speak Afrikaans, and vice versa. I mean, it is understandable if some ponsy Pom who’s never set foot outside London and who has never heard a Scot or a German or Dutchman speak calls Bach “Buck”, but are there such hideously sheltered creatures, such linguistic Gollums in real life? If you’re not one of them, you have no excuse whatsoever for mangling poor Johann Sebastian’s surname.

Which brings me to sports commentators. Yes, I do realize that all the sports commentators in the world together have about as many brain cells as Upper Wotnot’s village idiot, but if a parrot can learn to mimic certain sounds, surely sports commentators can, too? OK, it may take ten times longer, but it should surely be possible. If all else fails, ask a player how his of her name is pronounced, and keep on trying till you get close enough. At least people will be able to identify who the hell you are talking about. English-speaking commentators are the worst when it comes to any names other than English ones. Is this because they suffer from the after-effects of the hoary old Britannia rules the waves disease? Phonologists will tell you that vocal cords accustomed to the sounds of English are in fact capable of producing the same or similar sounds when they occur in other languages, so you have no scientific excuse…

Why do some men speak as if they have potatoes stuck up their nostrils and telephone poles up their rectums? Are all voice-over actors used in Australian TV commercials as camp as that weird Korean fellow Gok who likes to dress women? Is there a reason why we are told to buy X brand of mobile phone by someone who sounds as if he is about to have a homo-erotic climax? Why sound as if you are being throttled by a love-sick gorilla? It is, after all, just a phone made to be used, inter alia, by men who grow coir forests on their backs and who think a sock change should be an annual event coinciding perhaps with Anzac day. Is this a conspiracy by some hidden agency to turn all men into camp bottom-wiggling mincy-boys? It’s OK to be gay, not obligatory, you know!

And then there are the female voices… I suspect they are taught to speak with clenched teeth while baring every single tooth from incisors to molars, at the same time emulating the most kugel of Jewish hausmamas. Fran Dreschler is a lovely woman – until she opens her mouth to utter those horrible sounds. But to have to listen to a hundred Frans every time you turn on the TV? Oh, please!

I love most English accents you can find, be it from Yorkshire or Ireland, or any of the Scots accents. I love the way the French speak English. Spanish or Portuguese people also manage not to mangle the language, even though their pronunciation is far from that of Standard Received English. It is not the accent that kills me, nor the dialectical variants. Not even slang gets my goat. OK, I admit to an intense desire to commit slow strangulation, accompanied by relentlessly repeated blows to the speaker’s cranium, when my ears are brutally assaulted by “Like you know, he was like  ‘Wassup, yo?!’ and I was like duhhh!”. I don’t care where you come from, be it Putsondergat or Hillbilly Creek or Dingogotmedong or Ponsyputney, for Pete’s sake, just try to speak like the rest of humanity, not as if you are involved in a severely painful bout of coitus, or as if you have been doped and had a monkey’s vocal cords implanted in you, or as if your adenoids have swollen to the size of Pamela Anderson’s watermelons. Please take pity on those of us whose ears are accustomed to human speech, will you?

Oh, and by the way, it's "Folkswagen", not "Wholkswagon", just as it is "VEttel"  and not "WheTTEL", unless of course you are an udder whool...