Category Archives: Guardianistas

Maven of Mixcegenation

by in English Usage, Guardianistas, Mixed Metaphors, Politics and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The obfuscating and intentional doublespeak swirling around the emotive cauldron ingredients of “immigration”, “illegal immigration” and “small boats” has been intentionally leveraged into mainstream political and media jargon by Reform UK, big tech algorithms, and thence into the baying mob. […] We are daily enriched by, and should feel deeply indebted to, the many people of colour in this and other sectors of our society. — “This capitulation to racist rhetoric will not end well for Labour or Britain”, letter by Quentin Cowen of Laxfield, Suffolk in The Guardian, 18xi25

Post-Performative Post-Scriptum

“The obfuscating and intentional doublespeak swirling around the emotive cauldron of…” woulda bin even betterer. If the ingredients aren’t bubbling away in the emotive cauldron, why would doublespeak bother to swirl around them? It certainly wouldn’t swirl around them as much, one would’ve thought. And does “emotive cauldron ingredients” mean “emotive-cauldron ingredients” or “emotive cauldron-ingredients”? Maybe it’s both. I’m also struck by the implications of “intentionally leveraged”. Is it possible to “unintentionally leverage” something? Not in this context, one would have thought. And if doublespeak is swirling, that is, if it’s fluid, it’s hard to see how one could exert leverage on it.

Etc, etc. Like all the best Guardianese, this passage is passionately pregnant with interrogation-inducing imagery in a way that is very difficult to achieve by conscious effort. Perhaps Quentin has been smoking some wacky baccy or other psychoactive stimulant supplied by one of the many Persons of Colour enriching his life and fighting da power in da extensive hoodz of Laxfield, Suffolk.

Kore. Kounter-Kultural. Kommandments.

by in Guardianistas, In Terms Of, Keyly Committed Core Components of the Counter-Cultural Community, Politics, Transgression... and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

One thing I’ve noticed about in terms of the hardcore heretics and mentally magnipotent mega-mavericks who corely comprise the counter-cultural community… is that… some of them can get very upset… if you don’t think in exactly the same way as… they do and/or you criticize and/or… question anything they like, like…

With this in mind, I’ve drawn up some key counter-cultural commandments for anyone who wants to gain and/or retain popularity and/or influence among in terms of the hardcore heretics and mentally magnipotent mega-mavericks who corely comprise the counter-cultural community…

• Thou shalt NOT mock The Guardian and/or Guardian-adjacent media outlets…
• Thou shalt NOT exhibit sniffy superiority towards vis à vis folk with EngLit and/or Film Studies and/or EngLit-and/or-Film-Studies-adjacent degrees…
• Thou shalt NOT pyogenically problematize use of italics or trailing dots…
• Thou shalt NOT teratically toxicize “in terms of”, “prior to”, “core”, “key” or “toxicity”…
• Thou shalt NOT atrabiliously aspersicize the 2SLGBTQ+ Community…
• Thou shalt NOT even hint that American English and/or usage [CENSORED]
• Thou shalt NOT say Cormac was Crap…
• Thou shalt NOT refer to reference Mike Moorcock as “Britain’s biggest bearded Burroughsian lit-twat”…

But above all…

• Thou shalt NOT suggest that crisps are a key component of core counter-culturalicity (wow)…

So. Now. You. Know.

[Parallel-Posted at Papyrocentric Performativity]

Penny’s Petrified Parade

by in 2SLGBTQ+ Community Issues, English Usage, Guardianistas, Mixed Metaphors, Politics and tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Without political agitation, sex can always be co-opted, calcifying gender revolution into another weary parade of saleable binary stereotypes.” — Laurie Penny, Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2011)

So, In Terms of Transgenderism…

by in 2SLGBTQ+ Community Issues, Guardianistas, In Terms Of, Transgression... and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Beth Rigby, Sky News: This is an image we’ve seen a lot of recently, it’s a podium with a trans woman coming first and a biological women coming second and third. Do you think that’s fair, Ian?

Ian Anderson of Stonewall: So, sport by sport, people are looking at this. On elite sport, what you’re finding is that sporting body by sporting body is looking at this issue.

BR: Let me put it another way, how would you feel if you were number two and three in that scenario? Do you think that was fair?

IA: Well, I’m absolutely rubbish at sport.

BR: You know what I mean. How do you think this woman, this woman might feel about that?

IA: Yeah, so, I mean, everybody, we’re working our way through on this, this is, I mean, this is, I mean, how trans folk take part in elite sport.

BR: But this is a problem, isn’t it? Do you see this as a problem?

IA: So, I think it’s a problem in terms of the perception of the conversation.

[etc]

• “The Idiocy of Stonewall”, Julie Bindel

Give It Some Pivot

by in English Usage, Guardianistas, Linguistics, Mixed Metaphors and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hydrology, geology, acoustics and more combine in one magnificently muddled mixed metaphor:

When [Emily] Pankhurst ordered her followers to stop bombing the British state and start helping to arm it for the war effort [after 1914], it left some of the most radicalized to fall into “a feminist-fascist estuary formed in the crater generated by Mrs Pankhurst’s pivot from law-breaking insurgency to conformist cheerleading”. — ‘It’s a scary time’: Sophie Lewis on the ‘enemy feminisms’ that enable the far right, The Guardian, 21ii25

Among the baffling questions raised by the metaphor is this: Why “estuary”? It would make sense to say “[fall into] a stagnant and stinking feminist-fascist pool formed in the crater…” But estuaries aren’t stagnant and craters don’t create estuaries anyway. Rivers do when they flow into a sea or lake. What would the river and sea represent?

I’ve no idea. And I would find it very difficult to match that mixed metaphor without making it seemed contrived or confected. Mixed metaphors are a zen thing: for best effect, they’ve got to flow from the fingertips or float off the tongue without effort, welling up from a bottomless crater of bollocks like a meth-smoking bull in a china-shop riding a feral tsunami of unhinged imagery and clashing comparativization.

DavId and Ego

by in Über-Transgression..., Guardianistas, Keyly Committed Core Components of the Counter-Cultural Community, Surrealism, Transgression... and tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

David Lynch has died and, just as with David Bowie in 2016, my mind flies irresistibly to the ever-fascinating and ever-important topic of myself his artistic genius and how much I have it has meant to me down the years. I can barely remember as clear as day the first of the three countless times I saw Eraserhead. I was 18 15 and working in a chip-shop as a rent-boy to fund my sweet tooth heroin addiction during my History of Art degree at Bath tortured adolescence in Aberdeen. The brand-new ancient cinema smelt pleasantly of floor-polish stank of piss and my seat was so comfortable that I fell asleep twice rats scuttled around my feet beneath the splinter-filled seat. But I barely noticed, transfixed by the sheer weirdness taking place on the over-bright stained screen before me. As I left the cinema I was yawning my head teemed with the visceral visions I had just witnessed and wondering what to have for tea I marvelled at this surreal new super-luminary who had soared above my aesthetic horizon. In the years that followed I… Blue Velvet… I… me… Wild at Heart… I… my… Twin Peaks… my… I… Eraserhead… I… I… my… Eraserhead… Eraserhead… I… me… mine… Eraserhead… David, for your darkness, your deviance, your depravity, I salute me you!

© 2025 Multi-Millions of Mega-Mavericks in the Hardcore Hyper-Heretical Hive-Mind Community

Post-Performative Post-Scriptum

As for someone whose opinion on David Lynch really does matter – namely, mega-me, the omniscient Overlord of the Über-Feral – well, I didn’t have one. I didn’t think he was crap like Cormac McCarthy, I had no opinion at all. As the great (no, seriously) Public Enemy once said: “Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me.” The only thing I’ve ever marvelled at in terms of core issues around David Lynch is the loudness of the buzzing in terms of with which the Hardcore Hyper-Heretical Hive-Mind has greeted his departure. If film is more important to you than literature, then you’re like the vast majority of the human race. Wow. Etc.

Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• King Cormac – my thoughts on Cormac McCarthy, another visceral visionary whose departure elicited loud buzzing in the Hardcore Hyper-Heretical Hive-Mind (but less so)

• The Cruddiness of Cormac (continued) – further thoughts on visceral visionary Cormac McCarthy

Prosaic Mosaic

by in Ancient Greek, English Usage, Guardianistas, In Terms Of, Language, Linguistics, Literature and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

• בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ — Hebrew

•• Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν. — Ancient Greek

••• In principio creavit Deus cælum et terram. — Latin

•••• In the beginning God created the Heauen, and the Earth. — Early Modern English

••••• In terms of the preliminary period, a frankly outmoded hypothesized “divine” entity intitiated a core consultation exercise around a series of key constructive programmes vis à vis both the celestial but also terrestrial realms. — Guardianese

Elsewhere other-accessible…

• Ex-Term-In-Ate! — interrogating issues around “in terms of”…
• All posts interrogating issues around “in terms of”…

Reading the Roons

by in Art, English Usage, Guardianistas, In Terms Of, Keyly Committed Core Components of the Counter-Cultural Community, Language, Literature, Politics, Psychology and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

In terms of core issues around maximal engagement with keyly committed core components of the counter-cultural community, one of the saddest, sorriest and sighfullest sights among them is that of the talented lad from the wrong side of the tracks who betrays his class by turning himself into a Guardian-reader, in terms of core cultural assumptions and behaviour.

Northampton’s Alan Moore has done it.

London’s Stewart Home has done it.

Huddersfield’s John Coulthart has done it.

How do I know?

[Readers’ Advisory: If you are easily disturbed, distressed and/or disgusted, please stop reading NOW.]

I know because

[I mean it. Stop reading or you may well regret it.]

I know because each of these talented lads from the wrong side of the tracks now bears the Mark of the Beast, metaphorically speaking.

[Last chance.]

Each of them has, on multiple occasions and without the minimalest micro-metric of shame or irony, deployed the key Guardianista phrase “in terms of”.

• For proof of Alan Moore’s deplorable delinquency, please see here.
• For proof of Stewart Home’s dep-del, please see here.
• For proof of John Coulthart’s dep-del, please see in the same place as you possibly saw or are-about-to-see Stewart Home’s, i.e. here.

So. After seeing and lamenting those horrific examples of class-betrayal, I thought I was hermeneutically hardened and would never again experience sadness, sorrow or sighfullness at the sight of a talented lad etc.

I was wrong.

As I learned when I read this interview in The Mail on Sunday:

There was a lot of negativity in terms of my mum getting frustrated with us as kids, messing around all the time, smashing things in the house and my nan lived in the same road, a few houses down. […] In terms of therapy, I have spoken to a few different people. I have never done a period of time where I have done two years with someone and it has been ongoing. […] Everything I am asking of those players in terms of hard work, honesty, trust, commitment…if I was just to turn round and say “I have had an offer, I’m off”, I honestly couldn’t do that to the players and the staff. — Wayne Rooney reveals his secret two-day drinking binges etc

Oh, Wayne, Wayne, Wayne. How could you do it? But I think we can easily guess where he was infected: it was during his therapy-sessions.

Elsewhere other-accessible

• Ex-Term-In-Ate! — interrogating issues around why “in terms of” is so teratographically toxic…
• All posts interrogating issues around “in terms of”…
• All posts interrogating issues around the Guardian-reading community and its affiliates…

Gleet the Beatles

by in English Usage, Guardianistas, In Terms Of, Language and tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Guardian incisively interrogates issues around the Scouse Superstars:

Just in terms of pure sales they still dominate. In the first half of the year in the US – half a century on from Ed Sullivan, screaming fans, the olds just not getting it – they sold more albums than anyone else; the only group that came close over that period were BTS, a group who are regularly compared to the Beatles in terms of their planet-straddling massiveness. — The Guide #10: the enduring appeal of the Beatles, The Guardian, 26xi21

Elsewhere other-accessible

• Ex-Term-In-Ate! — interrogating issues around why “in terms of” is so teratographically toxic…
• All posts interrogating issues around “in terms of”…
• All posts interrogating issues around the Guardian-reading community and its affiliates…

The Grates of Roth

by in English Usage, Guardianistas, In Terms Of, Music and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Van Halen’s Diamond Dave fails to sparkle:

In terms of music, it’s all Brit. It’s Freddie, Bowie and the guy in Zeppelin. Theatrically, you’re looking at Spider-Man, with a little Groucho thrown in. […] Pushing boundaries in terms of what [Van Halen] wore was never an ambition of ours, but it always seemed to be where we would end up. — David Lee Roth: ‘My advice for aspiring artists? Breathable fabrics’, The Guardian, 25vi2019.

Note that he said “Theatrically…” rather than “In terms of theater…” So he should’ve said “Musically, it’s all Brit.” Rather than using the ugly and pretentious “In terms of music…”

• Hal Bent for Leather — Rob Halford talks like a Guardianista too