Lionel Shriver identifies some words and phrases she dislikes here.
I don't disagree with her, but if you really pinned me down to choosing only one word that I would prefer never to see again, I would have to pick "ontological". Try this piece and tell me that you don't begin to dread "ontological" looming ahead for the three hundredth time, yet another Becher's Brook and you stuck in the Grand National of pompous pronouncement where "foreground" has somehow become a verb.
I read this passage in today's Telegraph and wondered if we have learned anything at all since 1914:
"The current job of the Ukrainian infantry is basically to sit in trenches and get shelled. Those who survive the barrage must then engage in firefights with approaching infantry and tanks. The survivors of that encounter then wait for the next artillery barrage. And so on.
Their Russian enemies have it even worse. Accounts from prisoners of war, pro-Russian military bloggers and public quarrels between Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group’s chief, and the army command paint a picture of apocalyptic casualty rates, suicidal human wave assaults, and piteous shortages of ammo and kit."
I wondered how to head this post and only came up with cliches about smashed innocence and a lost golden age. Rejecting these, I went searching for sayings by the famous on the subject of war. Several caught my attention:
"Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means." ~ Ronald Reagan
"Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please." ~ Niccolo Machiavelli. (Vladimir Putin must be beginning to recognise this truth, surely).
"We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war." ~ Mao Zedong (this one struck me as worthy of Orwell at his most satiric)
"Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding." ~ Albert Einstein
"We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace." ~ Jeane Kirkpatrick
In the end though, this is the one I liked the best:
"War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
I went through a brief phase of being outraged when A.A.Gill announced he'd killed an ape to see what it would feel like. Then I realised that I had fallen into his trap and reacted precisely in the way he hoped. So I went back to enjoying his writing, which has a kind of mad acerbic courage and also makes me laugh.
Now he is dead, I am running out of new things by him. I was therefore glad this morning to discover a volume of bracing advice columns he wrote in response to real or imagined letters from readers.
This one I think could or should have been addressed to the author of Spare, although at the time Gill died he could not have known what a psychobabbling nitwit that person was going to become - and of course university has not been part of his "life journey":
I was in a doctor's waiting room with a six-month-old relative recently. Minutes after arriving there, while waiting for the baby's mother's name to be called, it had dawned on us that we had forgotten to bring any of the baby's toys.
How would I amuse the baby without the usual gang, we wondered. Without the dear little pink rabbit that had been ordered online and unexpectedly turned out on arrival to be no bigger than a hand. Without the ranks of Beanie babies preserved in a pristine state for 25 years by the baby's aunt. Without the strange furry creature with a long curling tail, a face like an Alison Utley hedgehog and tiny human hands that always make me think of the Queen's remark when Giles Brandreth pointed out to her that Rupert Bear has the head of a bear but the hands of a human:
"I’m sorry you told me that. Some things are best left unknown, don’t you think?"
Oh well. We would have to manage. The baby's mother headed off to her consultation, and the baby and I looked around. There was a grey abstract painting with splashes of glued-on-gravel. There was a glass case containing herbal remedies marketed by the doctor. There was a flat screen television riveted to the wall and not turned on.
Not easy to get much excitement from that lot.
But there was the mask that I was supposed to be wearing but had taken off because it made my glasses mist over. The baby, with the delicate care of a newly learnt skill, closed thumb and index finger on one corner of the blue papery cloth of the mask itself. Then, with equal concentration, she clasped one of the mask's soft white loops between the thumb and index finger of her other hand.
She lifted the hand that held the loop. She stared in wonder. This wasn't like ribbon or cord or any thin stringy thing that she had encountered so far in life. It stretched. And, look, if you let it go, it bounced back into place. Let's try that again. And again. And again.
A quick glance at me - without words her huge eyes convey that this is amazing.
Back to testing the limits of stretch and spring.
And then a man entered. He went over to a small bowl I hadn't noticed that sat on a table underneath the television. He scooped up a handful of wrapped sweets and took a seat on the other side of the room.
The baby watched him closely as he moved about, and then she returned to her investigation of soft elastic. Ping. Ping. Ping.
And then, such excitement - the man unwrapped a sweet, and the rattle of the foil wrapper caught the baby's attention. What was that amazing noise?
The baby stared in the man's direction, but the noise had already ended Back once more to ping, ping, ping, ping, ping.
Until another sweet paper rustle. The baby's head jerked up again. She looked over at what she thought must be its source. He was absolutely still now, his attention absorbed by his telephone. No further noise or movement from his direction. What on earth could it have been.
And so it went on - a mask and some sweet papers provided twenty minutes of absorption. When the world is new, almost nothing is dull, it seems.
When the baby's mother came back and asked if there'd been any problem, I explained that it had all been fine as the baby had found some pingers.
At which the baby's mother raised an eyebrow. Pingers, I now know have a specific meaning. Pingers are most unsuitable for babies, no matter how desperate you are to entertain them. Just stick with simple things.
