A Word About Meaning
by
, 11-06-2006 at 12:17 AM (7145 Views)
This is not a blog
Well, clearly it is. A blog I mean. So why the title?
I am not, as you may have assumed, simply trying to be clever. In reality, I have a pathological and completely irrational hatred of the terms 'blog', 'blogger', 'blogging', 'blogged' and 'blogginess', and I won't be mentioning them again. Thank you.
Going into battle with six pairs of socks
I myself have not yet worked out quite what this means. It was taken from a 1935 war picture called The Dark Angel. The love interest, played by Merle Oberon, fretting over the comfort of her lover, Frederic March, packs him all manner of expensive food and clothing. March, being the stereotypical practical male soldier figure, objects to this attention, saying "Fancy going into battle with six pairs of socks!".
This, quite clearly, is not what I mean.
I picked the subtitle on impulse so, as I've said, I don't know what I mean by it, but the image of a person going into battle with nothing but six pairs of socks, balled up and used as projectile weapons, is a bit intriguing. This poor fellow is, of course, destined to be mowed down like a field mouse in an automatic car wash. He's clearly not going to make very much progress in whatever he's trying to do by throwing a dozen wadded up bits of polyester at it, perhaps an apt metaphor for my various crusades, such as my attempt to get the entire continent which I live on to say 'football' instead of 'soccer', or perhaps I'm just really pretentious. Also, my six-pack-of-socks soldier, while unlikely to get much of anywhere, is also unlikely to screw thing up particularly badly, a condition which I aspire to.
Or maybe I just like the way those eight words go together. One never knows.