The Joy Of Binary Language

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've come to call it binary language - the American-inspired habit of simplifying language to the point where the world is either ordinary or awesome. We have now added another layer to this minimalist interpretation of life, the universe and everything, because, well, sometimes things are more awesome than just awesome. Sometimes they're super-awesome.

So, like, a Kit Kat is awesome but a Kit Kat stuck in a Mr Whippy ice-cream like a double 99 is super-awesome. If you want to add emphasis you can call it so super-awesome. The longer the so, the more emphasis is given. When you get to the stage when the so is so long you haven't got enough breath to keep the o (which is actually a w disguised as an o) going, you can take it to the next level - if you replace the Kit Kat with, like, a flake, well dude, that is like hyper-awesome. Logically, therefore, if you sprinkle cocaine on it, it would be uber-awesome.

It's like a form of crowd-sourced Esperanto - a reduction of language to simplicities that render it universally accessible, created by the community for the community. We can now communicate rich landscapes of human emotional reaction just by the addition of these simple qualifiers. So I'm pissed you burned down my house, but if you burned it down and my insurance had lapsed, I'd be super-pissed. There's no doubting you'd mistake quite how pissed I am, man.

We can also add some neat monosyllabic emotional indicators to this rich soup of neo-English. Yew, for instance to denote disgust, wow to denote amazement or delight and aww to denote disappointment. There's no doubting that 'Yew, that was so super-gross' is a clear statement of absolute disgust and it does neatly circumvent any need for using a wider vocabulary to communicate the sentiment or its strength. In fact, with an almost complete lack of vocabulary, most states of the human condition are now not only neatly within the reach of expression of anyone with the intelligence of a mildly retarded mongoose, they are also within the range of comprehension of such a mongoose.

The mongeeses will undoubtedly inherit the earth. Super-soon.

And yes, thank you, I do feel better now.