Showing posts with label Winchester College. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Winchester College. Show all posts

Thursday 26 December 2013

Don't talk to me about social skills !

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


26 December




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 :





End-notes

* If that is what traffic wardens are now called.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)