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26 December
Some talk of 'social skills', but they mean neither skills, nor anything other than the related word 'sociable' - being nice / kind / polite
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 26, 2013
Is it 'a skill' being tolerant, patient, thoughtful, caring ? A skill acting convincingly as if one were ? Social skills = alliteration rut.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 26, 2013
Some kind souls, on related tracks, gave us road rage, the rather offensive gender bender, yummy mummy, and the pink pound, for example. We may have been happy without these terms (particularly the second one), but somehow we gravitate towards them, as if they were indispensable, led on by the spell of rhyme or of the alliteration :
It takes an effort to rebel, almost as if the concept of road rage were an inevitability that we resist - if we can at all - at our peril, because we fear falling into aporia, or even aphasia : that is the label, and we must use it.
Except that people who become furious on the road are furious in no different way, just because the source of their intense reaction comes from driving, and the trite phrase not only does not acknowledge the truth that a shop assistant could just as easily be beaten as a fellow motorist or other road-user, but also makes a separate species of alleged rage almost obligatory.
It certainly becomes categorizable, and so capable of tallies being kept of incidents of this new monster of road rage, whereas the public service workers, such as shop assistants or nurses or parking operatives*, have no name for the outrageous behaviour unleashed on them, and so no publicity or real recognition.
Back at these so-called social skills, this is just a snobbish label for saying both that someone is impolite or gruff, and that the fault lies with their inadequate parents and family circumstance : George has no social skills, even if it is not a ridiculous exaggeration, really damns his entire upbringing and status as a human being, for (as the motto of, amongst others, Winchester tells us) manners maketh man.
Needless to say, but George has probably deviated from doing for the speaker what the speaker expected, or has done something that the speaker (from the speaker's elevated and unfailing understanding of these things) otherwise deems inappropriate, so he deserves to be blasted as of no worth, even to his scurvy face.
Oswald
Why dost thou use me thus? I know thee not.
Kent
Fellow, I know thee.
Oswald
What dost thou know me for?
Kent
A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave, a lily-livered, action-taking knave, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue, one-trunk-inheriting slave, one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deny'st the least syllable of thy addition.
But to end with a little Twittery :
'Henry, the truth is you ain't got no manners, and no finesse' ~ Gertrude Stein, @parisreview @stuartnuttall
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 25, 2013
'Those who can tolerate Miss Parker would find earthquake, wind and fire a pleasant change' ~ James Thurber @stuartnuttall @parisreview
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 25, 2013
'Some people are precious about who famously said first what anyone could say, so I largely attribute to Shakespeare' ~ First Folio
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 25, 2013
End-notes
* If that is what traffic wardens are now called.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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