标题: Nerd Do Well - 书评 [打印本页] 作者: 飞雪 时间: 2013-6-12 23:55 标题: Nerd Do Well - 书评 Review
'Hilarious, inventive and anarchic.' --The Times
'A beautifully written and very funny account of how a normal but very talented bloke who loves TV, comedy and films ended up a hu ...
It was a while before I dared utter the C-word in front of her, and when I did, it was met with far less amiable acceptance. I was a college boy by this time with some grasp of etymology and linguistics and my casual use of the word had been wilfully inflammatory.
‘Oh, come on, Mum,’ I sighed at her protest. ‘It’s just an old Anglo-Saxon word for the female organ which has been adopted by an inherently misogynist language as a negative epithet. It’s the same as “fuck”, it basically means the same as copulate, but the latter is perfectly acceptable. Why? Because copulate has its roots in Latin and Latin reminds us that we are a sophisticated, learned species, not the rutting animals that these prehistoric grunts would have us appear to be, and isn’t that really the issue here? We don’t want to admit that we are essentially animals? We want to distinguish ourselves from the fauna with grand conceits and elaborate language; become angels worthy of salvation, not dumb creatures consigned to an earthly, terminal end. It’s just a word, Mum; a sound meaning a thing; and your disgust is just denial of a greater horror: that our consciousness is not an indication of our specialness but the terrifying key to knowing how truly insignificant we are.’