The Sweet Release of Death

Yoos Talkin Shaq?

03/03/2010 10:18 PM Filed in:Your New Life Coach

Some days I’m simply amazed by some of my co-workers absolute disregard for the English language, and its awesome power that it can provide to those who respect it. This is not about the masterful wordsmiths among us. It’s not about those that when they speak, words flow so effortlessly and true, that the story unfolds before you. Your blood pressure lowers, your mind visualizes clearly, and robust. You escape. Sadly this is about The Butchers. The Hillside Stranglers of words and prose. The Assassins of the spoken word. The prison-shanking mob of e-mail land. Yes folks, its about the idiots or as I affectionately refer to as the (i)diots and Word Pervs. The really bad ones are the ones that write like they talk, and let me tell ya, they can’t talk very well to begin with. These folks well.. well they’re just special. Therefore they receive the honor of being dubbed the Shaq Talkers (we’ll get to their origin shortly, bear with me here) Their e-mails can just send you on your way to Laugh town. It’s almost like you woke up in a foreign country.

The (i)diots and Word Pervs, their disregard for the English language is rather pedestrian at best. They make you laugh, and you shrug it off and continue on. The Shaq Talkers on the other hand, well their execution of the English language is just that. An execution. It can haunt you for at least an hour and if you’re an English Major, it could very well kill you. Your English Lit soaked brain will try to make sense of their Word Hodge-Podge, and bring about the mother of all aneurysms. In e-mail form, you at least have a fighting chance, by deleting upon first sign of confusion, or do as my friend Malcolm does. He saves them for when he’s really hammered on the sauce. He then reads them in one massive sitting and tries to decipher them. He says it’s like a mix of Peyote and Sanskrit. Me, I just say no.

If you encounter a Shaq Talker face to face, and fancy yourself a good student of the words back in the day, brace yourself. For you are about to begin a journey down the trail of Abject Failure and Ignorance. You’ve been warned. There are ways to survive these encounters. I personally soak them in and then immediately write them down to expel the evil from my brain as quickly as possible. Kind of along the lines of John Coffey in The Green Mile (but I don’t grab them. That would buy me a first-class ticket to the HR dept.)
Just soak it all in...all the “eyes be doin dis an dat” and the “I gots to axe my boss da questin” So soak it in and purge it onto paper or the spanking new Powerbook Pro you bought yourself. You never know when you may have to act stupid down the line, and with all the field data you will have amassed, you’ll be all kinds of stupid. I mean Stoopid.

So where do they come from? Well, all walks of life from what I can tell. Some have been highly educated (Kegger!) and some have simply skated through life on finely tuned tits and ass or, chiseled abs and perky pecs. That’s why the Shaq moniker. Not because he’s black, because the man went to college. Holy Hells Bells! Have you heard that man speak when a flippin microphone is put before him? That frickin Baby Huey does an OJ hack-n-slash on old Mother English! Take it to the hole Shaq! Yeah, the whole sentence that is. Huh? Mumble, mumble, mumble..Icy Hot! But what if you don’t want to soak in their vile bastardized prose? What shall you do to combat the ways of stoopid? William. Fucking. Shakespeare. Or as I like to say: “Have the will to go Bill” Just as they start going down Dumb-Dumb Lane, just blurt out “Oh Titus! Come hither for art thou speaketh of Dunce! Won’t me lady flower us with brilliance rather than buffoonery? For art thou maketh my soul wander amongst fools” This is like the Brown Note for idiots. They will shit themselves... and steer clear of you for a very, very long time. You have my word on it.

Tags: Shaq, William Shakespeare, Powerbook, English,Word