Unholy Trinities - Friday Flash

him, her

Nina Pinta Santa Maria

mirror signal manoeuvre

jacket waistcoat trousers

chest waist hips

guitar bass drums

thesis antithesis synthesis

fish chips gravy

fish chips mushy-peas

tick tack toe

inch foot yard

rock paper scissors

Clotho Lachesis Atropos

larva pupa imago

father mother child

frankincense gold myrrh

faith hope charity

DNA amino-acid protein

protein vitamin carbohydrate

cereal toast eggs

Doric Ionic Corinthian 

solid liquid gas

knife fork spoon

morning noon night

liberty equality fraternity 

malleus incus stapes

Satan, Beelzebub Moloch

tens hundreds thousands

thousands hundreds tens

Homo Erectus Home Habilis Home Sapiens

id ego superego

bacon lettuce tomato

Charlotte Emily Anne

Eastern Central Pacific

Rachkovsky Dzerzhinsky Beria 

husband wife mistress

Okhrana, NKVD, KGB

pounds shillings pence

robbery assault battery

birth marriage death

Abraham Isaac Jacob

arrest trial sentence

Monolith - Flash Fiction

I was quarried from the seed of my stonemason father
And domesticated at my mother's hearthstone
I was anchored by my foundation stone
Safely buttressed by my stone fortifications
Until my father was epitaphed on his headstone
The copestone of his workshop fell on him stone dead
I lost my bearings with this degaussing of my lodestone
My mother draped in constricting grief like a millstone around her neck
Whereupon I became precipitantly blunted scissors to stone
I was angularly gouged by my kidney stone
I was acidly etched by my gallstones
Sticks, stones and brickbats did break my bones
Though I remained stone-deaf to those concussing chiders
People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, my windows were all put through anyway
In vain I tried to acuminate myself at the whetstone
Stonewashed drainpipe denim, dressed to kill
Only to be pip pipped by my peach stone
And de-pithed by my cherry stone
These stony-faced partners rejected me from ever becoming their clingstone
I scourged myself with a pumice stone
My own stonewalling body made it like drawing blood from a stone
I self-medicated the pain and became stoned immaculate with alchemical powders
But instead of sinking like a stone
Lift the stone and it's no longer woodlouse me that crawls out
I had been emboldened by my idiomatic stones
From somewhere I pulled out a modern day philosopher's stone
And stone the crows, my ship had come in
Petrified no more by my own stone cold failings
Now I was as polished as my gemstones
Apprised by others according to my precious stones
I positively scintillated from my gemstones
Treasured for my precious stones
I want Ray Winstone to play the part of me in the movie
But under no circumstance will it be directed by Oliver Stone
But the stony-hearted users in the guise of being a friend
Pebble dashing their blarney stone hard luck stories at me
The mephitic whiff of brimstone accompanying their devilish smiles
The road to hell is paved with stoney-eyed intention
My well of ever spouting ambrosia swiftly became sown with stone
Within a year I was back stony broke
But their demands never slackened, immuring me beneath my own foundation stone
My rolling stone stilled, moss gathered upon the inscription of my headstone

140 Character Assassination - Twitter & the need for precision of language

On Tuesday someone I follow on twitter announced they were leaving having been driven off through tweets received. This blew up really quickly and so I was able to glean very little in the limited time I had access to their timeline before the account was deleted. Being a timeline only of their tweets, I couldn't see what abuse or menace they were on the receiving end, so I could very well have the wrong reason they found their back to the wall. But I think it was over the use of a single word.

The word 'banter' in its original meaning has the sense of light-hearted verbal exchange. Certainly nothing aimed at wounding. But the word has I think developed a bit more edge as it is used as an excuse to defend hurtful barbs. This is particularly true of team sports dressing rooms, where the cut and thrust of banter is perceived as both a team bonding instrument but also a tool for toughening up. The logic running something like if you can't take the competitive asperity of a dressing room, you probably won't be able to survive in professional sports. It's a proving ground of sorts. A verbal assault course that has to be bested. It's a completely non-sensical argument, since a team dressing room is absolutely the place to retain grudges, because you are forced together with people you probably don't like every day with no escape. As to team building, how many soccer clubs banned card schools that were supposed to help bonding, only for the playboy millionaires to have huge gambling debts with team mates that only ruptured any sense of unity? So much is excused as being 'just a bit of banter' and players often claim they love 'a bit of banter' with the crowd, until they lose it and respond with a gesture that lands them in trouble with the governing body, or worse. I don't think Eric Cantona saw it as just a 'bit of banter' when he leapt into the crowd with a karate kick at an opposition fan who had been baiting him.

So the word itself has perhaps become degraded from its original sense. The ex-twitterer didn't even use the word 'banter', but the slang foreshortening of it to 'bants'. I think the tweet was something like "just bants". I was completely unaware of this idiom and had no idea that's what they were referring to. So I went online to look it up in that gospel of idiomatic usage "Urban Dictionary". I saw that 'bants' was just a shortened slangy version of 'banter', perfect for the cramped language use encouraged by 140 characters on twitter. You shave all of a single character by such usage.

But I'm an old hand at referencing "Urban Dictionary". I know full well that there is likely to be more than one interpretation of any slang or idiomatic term or phrase listed there, and indeed validation and veracity are, as is the prescription of our age, voted on as to confirm or reject. Indeed 'bants' has another meaning and I suspect it was this that brought down the opprobrium on the tweeter's head. (As is often the case, there are actually a couple of minor variations on this second meaning, as UD always manages to convey a sense that any verbal explanation has had its vowels and consonants mangled in the telling as is the wont of the generations who speak without moving their upper lip and that the transcription on UD reflects this local and regional variation).

I'm not going to reproduce the alternative meanings, you can look them up yourself if you're so minded, but it seemed apparent to me that here was a difference between a UK English interpretation of the word 'bants' from an American English one, where the words is actually an acronym and its letter 'N' is highly charged as reiterated once again only this very week in the UK by Jeremy Clarkson's grovelling apology for using it and in the US, by a professional sports team owner stirring up the whole race issue with his own players and abdicating his right to own just such a sports team.

I knew neither meaning of the word as indeed I'd never heard the word before. I think it highly likely the tweeter only knew of the UK English one and thus fell foul of an unintended reverberation in its use. Is that a defence? I have absolutely no idea to be honest, in such a fast changing world of slang and idiom it simply isn't possible to stay on top of every single new word and phrase. "Urban Dictionary" being a crowdsourced compendium of such usage only encourages faster coinage of new idioms and all are of course completely unsubstantiated.

But and this is a big but, you put yourself and your opinions out in public on platforms like Twitter, you better be prepared to stand by and back up every word you post. Because if you put stuff out there that you are not in full comprehension of its meanings, shades, imputations, undertones and overtones, then you expose yourself to all manner of challenges. Should those challenges be vicious, insulting and cruel? Of course not, but they will be and possibly more since the current state of both legislation and law enforcement seems totally overwhelmed by the virtual phenomenon. Which brings me back to the dressing room. It's not how I would choose to forge a bonded, united team environment, but at present that is the state of affairs. You stand up and back yourself with a rhinoceros-plated hide, or you go under. It is the same in social media. And getting your language right is a crucial part.

Crush - Friday Flash

He arrested his pumping thrust mid-stroke. Stout-hearted oak almost toppled over the card sharper operating on the sidewalk. Nearly induced a cardiac-attack. The man gathered up his ill-gotten gains into a sac and transplanted his procedure elsewhere. Somewhere less congested.

Heart in mouth, bated breath in suspended lungs. Could it possibly be?

His heart missed a beat as he distended his neck to search out his bypassed Miss.

That old throb started tugging at his core. His organ burning in his chest. The blood pulsing around his veins at a rate of knots, tingling agonisingly. His heartstrings tangled like a cats cradle. He shot his shirtsleeves tight over his wrists to try and venesect the pressure. But it was too late. The heart of the matter was indeed his heart. A resuscitated pang for his love. A one woman love infarction. That heart stopper and head turner had just crossed his path again. Encased in a sable stole.

And then the old ticker skipped as did his stride. There she was moving at a cracking lick. It was his heartfelt wish to see her, to talk to her again. He gathered up his pace- making. Heartily, lustily. His ticker hammering away at his ribs like a xylophone with joyous excitement. He put his hand over his chest to see that his fit-to-bursting heart was still contained within. Still in the right place.

The motor was powering his legs like pistons. Systole... as he bounced up in his stride. Diastole on the downstroke, although he felt he was being carried along on a cushion of richly oxygenated air.

She entered the revolving door of a hotel. He followed her directly in the next glass chamber behind. She contracted sight of him and missed her opening into the atrium, instead going round another circuit. Her lashes fluttered and his heart responded in kind. But hers was a double-take quickly followed by a double declutch of her expression. A look more dagger than arrow to the heart. Tricuspid valve slamming shut on him like a tomb, rather than Cupid's airy flight. Furry venous, not Venus in Furs. His heart sunk with displaced hope. Footsore and heartsick. He knew in his heart of hearts that they were never to be heart and soulmates.

Murmuring to himself, he slowed his rate and let her heart-free into the bosom of the lobby. As he re-emerged back into the arteries of the city, the smell of warming cockles from a stall rendered his sclerotic muscle into a ball of wrinkles.

Heartbroken.

from the flash fiction collection, available from Amazon Kindle store free to download 3rd-7th June 2016