THE VEGGIE'S FULL-TIME

This week, I’ve been mostly thinking about F. R David, best known for the 1981 song 'Words'. This is not because I've developed a sexual interest in bouffant hairstyles or people who wear sunglasses indoors, but because the opening line of 'Words' - "Words don’t come easy to me" - whilst it doesn't rival the expressions of alienation found in, say, Kerouac - does describe the kind of week I've had. 

Simply put, every day this week has brought with it a phrase or word that I have literally NEVER EVER heard before. In fact, there have been occasions when I’ve thought: I’ve probably just had a stroke and lost the capacity to understand language.

Last Saturday, for instance, we took the kids to McDonalds.  (Before you keel over with horror, this is NOT my normal routine. Normally, I would, ahem, plate up a lovingly prepared lunch of artisan-baked breads and antipasti, obviously.) But on Saturday, we were busy, and I thought, heck, what’s wrong with eating the occasional chicken vagina with a bucket of salt? But when we arrived at the drive-in window to collect our ‘food’, we were greeted by an empty-handed waitress who twitched a little, and said, “Veggie’s full-time.”

Veggie’s full-time?

VEGGIE’S FULL-TIME????????????????????

Sorry love, but I don’t speak Wookie.

My partner looked at me, and I looked back (rare, as we are both normally locked in our own private spheres of hell). The waitress sensed we were struggling.  She repeated herself, adding the definite article, a cheeky verb phrase.

“The veggie is full-time”, she said.

Shit, I don’t mean to be rude love, but I still don’t speak Wookie.

Thankfully, my partner finally twigged. “Do you mean the veggie-burgers take longer?” he said. He is a genius, my partner. He has such a feeling for context, for the underlying structures that govern language, he is like Chomsky, or fucking Derrida. The girl nodded. “Park b’there”, she said, pointing us in the direction of the parked order bays.

It's not the first time. 

A few days earlier, I lost the rectangular ‘stick-on bit’ of my car radio. I was trying to explain this to a friend, when she laughed and said, “Do you mean the face-off?” The face-off? ‘Face-Off’ is a film by John Woo, with Nicholas Cage and John Travolta, not another word for the stick-on bit of my car radio. Face-off is a phrase that describes a confrontation or the beginning of a game of ice-hockey, not, I repeat, the stick-on bit of my car radio. But if face-off IS the word for the rectangular stick-on bit of my car radio, how come you know this?  And I don’t? What the fuck is wrong with me?  

I blame my mother, of course. My mother replaces all proper nouns with the words ‘thing’, ‘thingy’ or ‘thingummyjig’. A conversation with my mother goes something like this:

Mother: Have you seen that thing I brought up with me? I hope I haven’t left it in the thing.

Me: For the love of God. 

or

Me: Do you mean your whistle? *

My father also has an interesting approach to proper nouns. He prefers metaphors that bear little resemblance to the original object. Partly, this is because he has no idea what the original object IS. Examples include ‘atomic machine’ to describe ‘microwave’, and “ludicrous new-fangled walkie-talkies’ to describe ‘mobile phones.’ In short, he lives in a parallel universe that I like to call ‘The World According to Someone Who Once Left A Big Fuck-Off Chunk of Radioactive Plutonium in their Pocket Whilst Working at a Nuclear Research Facility’.

So maybe words don't come easy to any of us. 

* PS There are no sheepdogs in the family. Just my dad.