Thursday, November 18, 2004

Scarlet Woman

There’s some new handbills pasted up on my way from the bus station to work that are raising a number of points of attention and interest for me.  The handbills are normal enough in their medium: 8.5 x 11 inches, pastel colors (blue/yellow/pink/green), covered with hand-drawn block capital lettering, mostly in straight lines, mostly carefully rendered if somewhat juvenile in form.  There are just a few to be seen in the course of my three-block walk.  But the thickness of the lettering clearly transmits a seething rage that draws my eye each time I see one.  What I read there on such occasions is hereinbelow reported in its entirety exactly as written.  My notes and impressions are listed thereafter. 

SCARLET
THE WHITE WOMAN YOUS ALL KNOW.  IS WANTED IN OTHER STATES FOR ROBBERIES AND MURDERS.  A 25,000 DOLLARS REWARD IS ON HER. SCARLET IS A CARRIER OF AIDS SHE HATES THE BLACK PEOPLE.  SHE HAS GIVEN THOUSANDS OF BLACK PEOPLE AIDS SHE USES HER FILTHY MOUTH TO GIVE AIDS TO YOUS SHE HATES.  CALL IN AND GET THE REWARD OF 25,000. 

Points of Attention and Concern:

* I did not know about the robberies or the the malicious infection activities.  But I knew that Scarlet bitch was trouble the first time I saw her bust Mr. Boddy’s head open in the library with the candlestick.  Her description, though, as the “white woman” raises some disturbing and heretofore unanticipated questions about Mrs. White.

* I note an important advance in both grammar and the very nature of human existence in the first clause (it’s not quite a sentence but has such strong declaratory presence I can’t hold that against it):  We are asked to consider a woman “yous all” know.  It’s been my position for years that English sorely needs a second person plural, a “vous” to our ubiquitous “tu,” a way to distinguish this “one other person” from that “group of other people.” I’ve cast my vote for “y’all,” for reasons that need not be reiterated now.  But our anonymous author has gone one brilliant step further: he’s taken the standard pluralization convention of adding the terminal sibilant, and combined it with the more formal, uncontracted (protracted?) version of y’all - you all. “Yous all” stands out to me as, perhaps, the first ever example of the second person plural, plural.  It might even be second person squared.  Do you see where this is going?  It’s the intersection of differential calculus ("the fluxions") and sociology ("the bends").  Brilliant scientists will be able to use this principle to develop unintelligible and exasperating formulae that seek to explain the very nature of group existence.  And I was there when it all started.  Kind of makes me get misty.  Philologically speaking, I mean.

* Dude - THERE IS NO PHONE NUMBER TO CALL FOR THE REWARD.  Don’t be playing me, yo.  Email the digits and I’ll cut you in. 

Please feel free to report any bizarre or inexplicable handbills and circulars you may encounter to the Chucklehut and I will try to give them the publicity they deserve.