Friday 13th September

“Pass me a tissue, I can’t see Diddly-Squat.”  On hearing this perfectly ordinary phrase this morning suddenly made me go all autistic and begin wondering why on earth my partner should want to see that famous old R’n’B singer Bo Diddely concertina his legs and assume the position, preparatory to, during or after defecating.

Why do we use such silly expressions, and where do they come from in the first place?  Language is constantly evolving, of course, and I am often torn between the two disciplines.  There is the ‘proper’ brigade, who insist that there is correct usage and nothing else should ever be allowed.  Though just pick up a novel from the thirties, Somerset Maugham for example, and you will see how in just eighty years what is considered correct usage now would not have been tolerated then.  Go even further back to the Victorians, and they were using turns of phrase which have either a completely different meaning or have fallen out of use today.  Then there is the modern lot who think that ‘pidgin’ English, facebook scribble, lack of punctuation and even text abbreviation all somehow add to our ever-expanding vocabulary, and eventually enrich us.  I am all for multi-culturalism.  Well, who isn’t?  Or is allowed to say they aren’t?  And many words from our colonial past have slipped into our language and roll off the tongue easily.  I have more difficulty with facebook and twitter, where instant response un-thought through words and symbols spill out often lacking both punctuation and meaning.

But anyway, my glasses are misting up too, and for the life of me I can’t see Diddly-Squat.