Where have all my comments gone?

There used to be a healthy discourse on my blog. People left comments to which I’d reply, then others might join in, helping to brew up a cauldron of exchanged ideas.

Then I started to use facebook as a portal to the blog and overnight the comments disappeared. Being a scribbler and a wordy old hoor, I still enjoy using just as many words as I deem necessary. Not too many and never too few: just enough; the right amount.

Yet today the world of words is shrinking. Not sufficient that text messaging and tweets allow only 140 characters with which to express yourself, facebook has now reduced the comments on my blog to a single mouse click.

Of course I’m delighted that people on facebook click to say they ‘like’ a link to the blog, but I miss those expressions of anger, joy and general bloody-mindedly opinionated thought that used to grace the bottom of my blog posts.

Ah well, maybe I should be grateful that in a world where ‘more’ rules the roost and ‘excess’ is a dream to be sought after, this need for fewer words is a good thing.

No, can’t buy that. I want to know what you’re thinking, and ‘like’ clicks representing approval or an absence of clicks to show dissent just doesn’t cut the mustard.

Does Largely Cloudy beat Mainly Cloudy?

paddyjokes.com

We all drop our chins in wonder at the popular myth that the Inuit have 40 words for snow, but right here at home in Ireland there’s a subtlety to the vocabulary of our weather forecast that has me flummoxed.

Despite what you see as evidence here in this colyoom, I tickle fancies of being a man of words, but all my scribbly instincts and blathering verbals proved useless when I looked at the weather forecast in the paper on Tuesday (it’s broken down into Ireland’s four provinces, roughly west, east south and north respectively).

Connacht: Generally cloudy today with spells of rain.
Leinster: Largely cloudy today with occasional rain.
Munster: Mainly cloudy today with outbreaks of rain.
Ulster: Largely cloudy today with periods of rain.

You don’t have to be a meteorologist to know that for at least 300 days a year we enjoy a mixture of sunshine and showers, and this colyoom has in past years romped with agitation about forecasts predicting ‘Rain at times, sunshine in places’, because with the only details we actually need to know having been rather ingeniously omitted, we have no idea at what times it might rain and in which places.

But this is a different matter; a question of language. I need to understand words and their uses in my adopted home’s vernacular, and also I need to be outside for those brief periods when the sun might shine down on my sorry soul.

So, does Largely Cloudy beat Mainly Cloudy?
Or is Generally Cloudy the biggest baddest adjective in the Irish cloudy lexicon?

As for rain, are Spells of Rain shorter than Periods of Rain?
Do Outbreaks of Rain come less often than Occasional Rain?
I haven’t a clue. What the bloomin’ ‘ell are they on about?

Perchance the poor bored artisan who had to fashion something readable out of a messy map of uncertainty made their lot less heavy by entertaining themselves with a dash of creative flair, in an effort to help the forecast appear less dreadfully repetitive and oppressively rank.

Or maybe I just don’t understand the power order of the words.
Help me out. I need to know.
Or maybe I just need help...

Stop attacking the black ice -it's only fulfilling its own destiny!

You’ll have to excuse this scribbler his fascination with words. I just can’t help it when one comes along and gets used every minute of every day, regardless of whether its usage is correct or apt.

The official word of the present cold spell afflicting Ireland and the U.K. is ‘treacherous’. The roads are treacherous. The pavements are treacherous. The black ice is treacherous. News readers and nanny’s alike use the word at every and any given opportunity, but each time the sad pedant that I am hears it, I want to wander off with that person into a gentle line of whimsical enquiry.

Do they really feel that the roads are treacherous? Do they believe the little lumps of tarmac are conspiring to trick them? Will the pavements chuckle with evil mirth as the old fella slips on the ice?

At a push, I can accept that we rely on the safety of surfaces upon which we walk and drive, so that if they should suddenly become dangerous they are in no small way letting us down. Even though I see ‘treachery’ as something rather grander, involving a castle, a king, a dagger and a close confidante sneaking into a royal bedchamber in the cold dark night, I can see how a pavement or a road might be construed as treacherous, if rather than supporting you safely it suddenly threatens your life.

But give a break to the black ice, eh? Black ice is designed to be dangerous and invisible. As it causes your car to skid it is simply fulfilling its own destiny. If black ice were to be truly treacherous it would probably have to melt upon impact with rubber, thus letting the black ice side down altogether.

If it’s treacherous you want, take a look at the way Nick Clegg and his Lib Dems have sold out their voters in England,.or the way the Irish people have been financially murderated to save the euro.

The black ice is innocent. It may be lethal , but it’s meant to be.

What's the shape of an unwritten word?

It’s not that I haven’t any material. 

This is not another tedious case of writer’s block or any other such deceit. 

Today I could write all manner of shite on a myriad of topics that might entertain, bemuse, annoy or even, possibly, inform or illuminate. 

Aaahze got tings to make yez laaarf and tings to make yez crahhhh.

Yet for some reason at present neither fully identified nor understood, I don’t want to. 

Save for the 4 years I lived in Amercia, I have published something every single week, from 1992 onwards. Sometimes I’ve written 3 in a week and sometimes barely one satisfactory word, but not right now.

Big whoops for the evidence that this is here. These words, stating that I’m not going to publish anything this week.

Words that by the intention of their own meaning do not exist.

Ooer missis. Getting a bit Zen.

There are no doubt souls out there who might believe that if a word is unread, it does not exist.

But what about a word that is unwritten?

Calling the Guru! Calling the Guru! Are you out there, my old friend?