Friday 6 November 2009

The M Word

Currently Loving: My maths teacher's total obliviousness to the youth of today's language. Today we had to explain what LOL, ROFL and LMAO meant. He thought the latter was LAMO, as in, what a lame joke. He seemed to get that alot.



Maybe it's just cause I'm growing up. Maybe everyone thinks the world is ageing with them, that the prospect of something once so well loved is now looked upon as babyish or immature. It causes some to panic - and why shouldn't it? The idea you can never get back to when life was simple, when you took it day by day and never worried about the future. Never worried about war, politics, the environment, illness, death, the terrible things humans can do to each other.
Never worried.
These people have good reason to panic.
I don't know how I've lasted this long.
Perhaps I haven't, and I'm mad already.

Magic - pure, simple wand waving - is never used anymore. JK Rowling got it right in most aspects, and I think the reason she's so popular is that the initial idea of a school for kids with wands, broomsticks, cats and potions, is that is so darn simple nobody thought they'd get away with it. But she did. And how.
But now it's all shady, diluted magic, even those books and programmes about magic itself. Tithe and Ironside, gritty, 18-rated Faerie books, show magic as hazy and uncontrollable, best left alone.
Merlin, of all things, uses long Latin phrases the boy wizard hardly ever gets right first time.
Betwixt, by Tara Bray Smith, doesn't even bother describing the odd, instinctive magic it's characters use. A guy turns into a human Moth. What? How, why?!
Hell if I know.

Then there's the fact most things are entirely disowning magic altogether, and replacing it with it's greatest foe. Science.
Heroes is about a group of people who have certain strands of DNA that generated unique abilities.
Gone, by Michael Grant, features an unanswerable Lost-like conundrum that we know is linked to nuclear fallout.
Even one of the shows I'm the most faithful to, the fantastic Doctor Who, dismisses magic as nonexistent.

Martha: Is it real, though? I mean, witches, black magic, and all that? It’s real?
The Doctor: Course it isn’t!

Dudes. What's wrong with a couple of choruses of Abracadabra?