Reader Q&A, The Third

Time to learn 📖

Happy Centenary! Yes, this is the 100th post of Slow Descent Into Radness, meaning we have officially outdone Shakespeare (37 plays), Vermeer (fewer than 40 paintings), the Super Bowl (played just 57 times), and the Hundred Years War (spanning 116 years, 1337-1453, but if you only count years of fighting, leaving out truces or periods of peace, well under 100 years)! What could be a more appropriate celebration for this happy milestone than the long-overdue third installment of our Reader Q&A series. This one’s a behemoth, so polish those smudges out of your reading glasses, boil up a pot of tea, plop down on your favorite padded (and scented?) surface and dive in. We do not recommend reading this aloud to your children, but we also don’t know much about raising kids — heck, Keith Carne’s dad showed him Bloodsport when he was four years old, and he turned out great!

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The questions for our Reader Q&As have been submitted by paid subscribers to S.D.I.R. If you’re a paid subscriber and want to submit a question for our next post, you should, and you can do that here. If you’re a free subscriber and want to up your game, you can take that important step, similar to marriage, here. You may also be interested in the first Reader Q&A, or the second one (🎧).

Hayley J. Dunlop asks, “If (when) you wrote (write) a novel, would you publish it under a pen name?

1a: What do you think constitutes a good pen name?

1a.1: Hang on (🧠brain whirring🧠), are you ALREADY publishing novels under a pen name?!”

Keith responds: This is a great question, and one I ponder frequently, because spending time chewing over rhetorical concerns is much easier than sitting down and actually writing a novel. Both sides have points in their favor. The benefits of publishing under our own names are practical: it’d certainly be much easier to leverage even our modest “celebrity” into a book deal, rather than starting from scratch as a writer with little or no public awareness of our names. We’ve got decent public-facing outreach on our socials (and right here with good old S.D.I.R!) and We Are Scientists has at least a modicum of brand recognition (certainly more than would, say, “Tate Mendelson” or “Butch Mandelson” or “Tuft Mundelsan,” my top three contenders for a pseudonym), and a publishing house would certainly be happy to exploit those all as a means of publicizing whatever novel they’ve taken on. Plus, our booking agent Mike Mori works at CAA, an artists’ rep agency that includes a full-blown literary branch, so he’d have to submit any drafts we’ve passed him to the relevant coworker, if he knew what was good for him.

The negative of publishing under our own names is the flip side of that very coin (the dark of that moon, for Transformers fans): everyone would assume that we’re literary dilettantes who only got a publishing deal because there was a marketable name attached. A slew of such books have come to my attention recently. Like, Tom Hanks has a novel out. I love old Hanksy, in films. Splash slayed me as a youth, and he’s very nearly reached similar heights a few times in his career. But do I believe for one second that knowing how to remember lines that someone else wrote and saying them without visibly concentrating means that he can write an even passable novel? Or that a publishing house wouldn’t simply snap up a Tom Hanks book even if the first line were “One day big dog came round of my house and I pet same big dog and then a mystery started”?

Actually, if that were how Hanks’ novel began, I might be fairly intrigued.

John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has written a handful of well-received novels, including 2022’s celebrated Devil House, but I haven’t bothered with them. The guy’s a great wordsmith, sure, but I can’t get over that prejudicial hurdle of mine. If I’d stumbled upon a book called Devil House by some schmo named Carol Teterboro, or whatever, I’d probably be interested. I love a story of a bedeviled house! This book is probably great! But, nah. I’ll just listen to the next Mountain Goats record, thanks. Do me a favor and put a song on it called “Devil House,” John!

Don’t even get me started on whether I think the Foo Fighters’ horror movie, Studio 666, would have gotten funding if those dudes were just a small filmmaking collective from Akron, Ohio. No fuckin’ way. “But,” you argue, “Will Forte is in it, and he wouldn’t sign onto a sub-par film.” Normally you’d be right, but we all know that Forte wouldn’t have signed onto that thing if his favorite song weren’t “Best Of You.”

But so anyway, yeah, it’s a conundrum, and I can’t square it. I think that, as an aspiring author, I would probably need to use the small foot in the door that the WAS name might afford. For his part, Chris could certainly write a novel worthy of publication without such a leg-up, but he’d surely get a better publishing deal if he exploited the WAS brand. How will we choose, when the time comes?

And what makes a good pen name, you ask? I personally like when a writer deploys a pseudonym that is evocative and genre-appropriate, preferably including an adjective. “Richard Stark” is a great one — simple, elegant, impactful — and I like to think it was the name itself that led Donald Westlake to write the best work of his career. Benjamin Franklin went too far with “Silence Dogood,” but he always did seem like a bit of a dip.

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Jason Smith wonders, “Inside the Lobes album you thank your families for letting you make music and not have to get an actual job. So, briefly imagining a dystopian world where WAS never existed, what actual jobs would you have done or have liked to have done?”

Sez Keith: Well, at around the time WAS got signed back in 2005, I was working for a film production house, IFC films, while the company was leveraging its value as a cable television channel to make a move into the world of production and distribution (the way some unethical musicians will leverage their celebrity into lucrative book-publishing deals). It was a great job, and my potential for promotion seemed limited largely by the fact that I consistently refused to accept any opportunity that conflicted with the band’s rise (e.g., I controversially bailed on scouting films at the very-important Tribeca Film Festival to do our first tour of the UK; I worked remotely from the back of the van for a week on the drive down to the SXSW where we ultimately signed with Virgin Records; etc.). I could have seen myself staying in the business, although the idea that all film production work eventually drags even the most resolute folks to Los Angeles could have been a hurdle. This is no slight on LA — great weather, killer tacos, margaritas squirting out of every garden tap — but the idea of working in Hollywood was a real non-starter. Next time you see me in person, ask about my experience working as a director’s assistant on the 1999 Paramount Pictures classic The General’s Daughter, and my reluctance toward Hollywood employment will be a little clearer.

As for Chris, my guess is that he’d be a toreador, as he loves sangria but hates cattle and taunts them, often.

Lou Tilsley asks, “Have you ever given Buckle the ‘under the sea’ treatment? Would you ever consider going back and doing new versions of some of your older songs?”

To which Keith replies: I’m not sure, actually. I mean, we loosely deploy the “Under The Sea” moniker to describe any recorded version of an existing song which has been rendered in a more chilled-out, atmospheric mode. The term was coined when we, for reasons I can’t recall, produced a version of the very first We Are Scientists song (“Mothra vs. We Are Scientists”) that stripped the Green Day-eque punky original into a quiet, shimmery dirge. One of the musical features of this re-thought “Mothra” was a recurring, steady blipping sound, highly reminiscent of a SONAR ping. Hence, “Under The Sea.” I don’t know if we ever released that version anywhere, but the usage of the “Under The Sea” classification later gained popular usage with the release of Crap Attack, our 2006 compilation of rarities and b-sides, which features four UTS treatments of songs from our debut album. If memory serves, those songs are all just straight-up acoustic versions. Our treatment of 2014’s TV en Français on its companion album TV en Français, Sous La Mer is more faithful to the original ideology behind the “UTS” label. Those versions are lustrous and if not liquid, then at least unguent.

Now, we do have an acoustic version of “Buckle.” We perform it almost any time we’re recruited for an acoustic performance, because we love it, especially the “bridge,” which just features us howling in harmony rather than playing the guitar solo. So, that is an “Under The Sea” treatment, but I don’t know if it’s been recorded. And if it’s not recorded, is it truly “Under The Sea?” After all, we call those shows “acoustic performances,” not “Under The Sea demonstrations,” or whatever. So, I don’t know! I DON’T KNOW!  I may not sleep tonight, for this.

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Kath Rogers wrote, “Hello, there’s been a load of UK festival lineups revealed this week, are you guys planning on playing at any of them this year?”

And Keith typed: The honest answer is that we’re probably not going to do much in the way of festivals this year, especially in the UK. We’ve been hammering the UK festival circuit pretty hard for the past few (twenty?) years, and we’ve got new music on the mind, so we thought it might be a good idea to take a break this summer to write, to reflect, and, you know, ride some speedboats with blended drinks in hand. That’s not to say that we’re hell-bent on absolutely not playing any UK festivals this summer; we love a good UK festival, and all reasonable offers will of course be considered. We’re just not actively pitching ourselves for them this year. Somebody’s got to make room for the poor old Wombats to get one festival in, you know? That said, we’ve got a couple of announced May festivals in the US that you simply should not miss! One’s in the desert, in the middle of God-knows-where Nevada. Given the visual aesthetic of Lobes, you know that we relish an arid and forbidding landscape. The other is a return to a festival that we played last summer in Annapolis, Maryland, which featured a sponsorship by the makers of a very tasty and highly-potent local frosé, and so there is no way we weren’t going back.

Otherwise, if you insist upon staying in Europe this summer, look for us on a boat off the coast of Capri or Malta or somewhere. If offered a glass of wine, we’re likely to oblige a request for a few hummed bars of “Human Resources.”

John Warren reveals, “I recently spent a couple of hours watching old WAS videos on YouTube, and it was a HOOT. Would love to hear your memories of which videos were the most fun to shoot and which were the most onerous.”

Then Chris writes: I can tell you right out of the gates that, with very rare exceptions, music videos are a lot more fun to watch than they are to make. The exception is “Contact High.” And actually, even though it’s fun zipping around on scooters and Slingshots (that’s what those daffy two-seat, three-wheel topless cars are called), and trudging around in the Miami surf in a blazer and slacks, the repetitiousness and intentionality of filming tend to drain away all jollity. I offer the caveat of filming or being filmed while astride a jet ski. Any span of time of any length spent on ‘ski-back, be it a moment or — imagine this! — a whole human life, is bliss. It is a physical, intellectual, psycho-erotic summiting. Try it.

I’ve been on-set for my fair share of music videos, as you know, but have only dipped my toe into entertainment that records not just picture but sound, and yet I feel confident enough telling you that as bad as music videos are, videos with diegetic audio are even worse. Because that’s one more thing that must be carefully set up by professionals, calibrated, tended to, nursed, coddled, frequently repaired or recharged, all before you, the actor, get to do the seemingly fun thing called for by the script, like getting thrown off a horse into a wedding cake, or kissing Scarlett Johansson. The sheer volume of stopping and starting and waiting and sitting and considering and pausing that takes place on a shooting set is easily vast enough to swallow up the fun.

You asked me about our music videos, John, and here I am, ranting. Let me try to focus.

Okay, so — again, excepting the part of the “Contact High” shoot when we were on jet skis — all the videos were onerous. Is that too bleak? It sounds a little bleak, typing it. God it sucks, making music videos. Okay, okay, okay — let me try to think of some good moments. Because yes, making music videos is like space: it is mostly awful, awful darkness, but there are bright spots.

I enjoyed meeting the dog who played the dog in the “After Hours” video. (I can’t remember his name — Barkley? Randall?) It’s always a pleasure to meet a nice dog, right? I’m not saying something radical. You can put your hand on their soft coat, their skin is warm through the fur, and they smell like life, not Lemon Verbena 99% Antibacterial Foaming Hand Soap, a nice change. It was also pretty fun — same shoot — getting a candy glass beer bottle broken over my head by my best bud. (Instead of a real glass one, like I’m used to!)

But Chris, you’re saying, if you liked working with that amount of candy glass — a handful — then you must have loved that whole big WALL of candy glass that the bear crashed through for “Nobody Move”! But no, John. No, that wall of glass was nothing but stress and anguish; it was a microcosm of divorce. That wall of glass — a very large “pane,” is actually what it was — cost $800, and we had two of them. We had two because candy glass is feeble. It makes real glass look like WOOD, for goodness sake. You know how when little kids are in movies, they tend to hire twins to play the role? That’s because little kids are unreliable as hell. Unlike Barkley or Randall, they are mercurial, irrational, unpredictable. Well, kids are wood compared to candy glass, in terms of reliability. The only thing less reliable than candy glass, I’ll venture to say, is a kid made of candy glass.

The point is, you need one good dog to play a dog, you need two decent kids to play a kid, and you should have ten panes of candy glass ready to perform the role of glass in your movie. This being a shoot on a budget, we had two.

The first pane broke while they were trying to set it into the frame. (I say the frame — it was a wall that a carpenter had built specifically to house this asshole pane of glass or its jerk twin.) The first pane broke and that left us with one, and if you think the hour or so during which the set designers carefully, carefully, ever so gingerly placed the jerk twin pane into its frame, and we stood around hoping our first major label video would still happen, and Chester, needing to be ready quickly, sweated in the bear suit, since even sitting motionless in a frame is intolerably irritable to candy glass — if you think that hour was fun, you’re nuts.

The rest of that shoot I remember as the three of us finding out just how poorly the recording of an album and rehearsing for shows and drinking of beer had prepared us for sprinting on camera. Of course it wasn't all sprinting: the sprinting was broken up by quickly climbing flights of stairs. Then it was back to sprinting. Did we not write that video’s premise? We did. So why all the running? John, all I can tell you is that it took us a damn long time to figure out that one’s imagination should not be allowed to run wild when one is planning a music video. One’s imagination should instead be taken to a safe, indoor playground — a place that specializes in kids’ birthday parties, with trampolines sunk into the floor, surrounded by safety netting, and rope swings over deep pits of soft shredded foam, and thick padding on every corner of every table and wall — and the imagination can be allowed to run wild there.

Take the video for “Buckle.” This is going to be fun. Throwing food at each other? This should be really very fun! Oh boy, we’re going to shoot it in super slow-mo? This is going to look awesome! This will be awesome and fun. Though, let’s think about this — would it be funnier if only one of us is throwing food, and the other guy is always getting hit? Haha! It absolutely would! That’s so sad! Love it! Okay, but still, tons of fun, what a laugh, this video is going to be FUNN!

Reader, the fun was limited. The fun was a small part. I say that as the guy who got pilloried, but even for Keith and the crew, there are only so many hours of flinging cake at someone that will continue to excite the mind. (It’s actually much less than even one hour, I would bet.) And the cleanup… funless.

One thing you should know, John, is that it’s always fucking COLD when you shoot a music video. This seems to be a universal law, a constant of some sort; it’s baked into the cosmic source code. “Dumb Luck”? Shot in the middle of winter, snow on the ground; cold as fuck everywhere we went, especially in the factory where Keith gets the nail in his eye and saws off his fingers, and even in the apartment where I put my hand in a blender cuz for some reason the windows had to be open (open wide). You think Keith was warm lying on the sidewalk for ten minutes while they got that overhead shot where he has fallen off the fire escape to his death?

The sidewalk is white because of cold snow.

Even in the rare instances when you’re warm for a minute on a shoot, like in the hot sun on the hot sand during “Contact High,” you soon grow cold. The sun goes down, the wind kicks up, you’re in wet clothes — always, always your clothes are kept wet on set — and your slowing brain wonders at the myopia of foresight required to have written yourself into this situation.

But how about “Chick Lit.” I mean, that one looks like it was shot on the grassy plains of Kansas or something. 🤣 No, no. It was shot on a bog in Ireland. There’s a long history of Ireland standing in for the American west, particularly in spaghetti westerns, and while it looks the part, it sure doesn’t feel the part. It’s not dry; there’s no dust. All is damp; all is bog. The creek I’m shaving in? Colder than the coldest Coca Cola pulled out of the coldest ice chest on the hottest day in Kansas.

Also, those dogs fucking stank. I don’t mean how Randall or Barkley smelled like “life.” If we had learned that those little dogs were spray-painted skunks, nobody would have batted an eye. “Yeah, that tracks.” Oh, and I think some of them bit? I might be misremembering that because they smelled so awful that my mind needs there to have been a malicious component to their presence, but I think they were biters, and that we were told to “give them space.”

The horses were nice enough, sure, but we don’t know how to ride fuckin horses, and the thing about horses is that when they sense unease in the saddle, which they immediately do, like a person’s nose sensing those fetid Pomeranians the moment their rusty old truck parks on set — when the horse senses unease he gets shifty, he starts shifting his legs around in the soft, boggy sod, picking up his hooves and shuffling around in place, which serves only to further destabilize a novice rider, and thus emerges a feedback loop that is perilous indeed.

Were we really imperiled? I don’t know. It felt scary enough — you’re way up there. Horses are fuckin tall. It’s like sitting on the roof of a house, and there’s an earthquake. And yeah, the bog sod was soft as fuck, but by the way, the horses hated that. They don’t like shifty ground any more than I liked my shifty, very tall seat (which itself was standing on shifty ground!). Yes, it was bad, maybe perilous, the horses, and the dogs smelled like dinner in hell, and the creek was ice cold and I had to sit with my boots in it and splash its crisp humors all over my face as I actually shaved by feel (no mirror) using a “straight razor” — just a sharp knife.

I will say — I risk sounding like Goldilocks — that the “Return the Favor” video was hot — scalding, stiflingly hot. Miami in July, with the dial set to steam. And that was in the era before we understood that the ideas we came up with when planning a video would actually, a few weeks later, become things that we were doing, so we didn’t write a “waterslide” scene, nor a “dally about in the fountain” scene, nor even a beach scene. (Am I wrong about that last part? Did Dan Monick tell us to run, fully clothed, into the surf, which by the way was like 91 degrees? Maybe. My heatstroke was too severe to allow memories much footing.)

John, look, I’m not trying to persuade you to see those videos and think of them as attempted snuff films, valid as that might be. There is a reason we keep making these things, after all, and it’s that we love the finished product — my god, do we love it. Our video library is among our most prized possessions, easily a rival for our collection of songs. We believe our videos are fine art; they fill us with pride. Few things elicit so predictably a giggle of glee from my or Keith’s mouth than visiting our YouTube channel and noticing that a play count has swollen a few views. Paradise. There is order. Hope is repaid. Innocence is true, pain is a currency, and it can buy joy. Please, John, whatever you do, no matter how much this bitter confession has complicated your pleasure, do not — DO NOT — stop watching. That is the opposite of my intent. Rather, I hope I’ve convinced you of these videos’ special value, carved as they were from our living bones, assembled on a table made of our backs, polished with our tears and color-corrected with our stifled cries. For your recent spate of viewing, we offer you praise and thanks. You shifted the play count, the number that displays our satisfaction. The number, John, that ranks our very souls.

🥵 ( by Dan Monick)

Jason Smith has another question: “I’ve been a fan for ages, so it felt perfectly natural for a slightly inebriated (and hugely star struck) me to greet Chris at the merch table in York way back in July with a cheerful ‘Hey Chris…’ before buying stuff and then heading for my train home.

In that situation, I clearly knew who Chris was but Chris would not have had a clue who I was. Despite this, I still greeted Chris as if we’d known each other for years. I’m assuming that you’ve both had similar situations over the years where you’ve been approached by fans who ‘know’ you, but you’re none the wiser as to who they are. So I’d like to know: whether those types of situations took some getting used to as your popularity as a band grew?”

Inscribes Chris: Interesting question, Jason. Rather than saying they’ve taken getting used to, I think I’ll claim that situations like the one you describe have simply lost their novelty. Not in a bad way, exactly — it’s more like they used to offer a happy little jolt that they no longer do. It’s no longer surprising, I guess, especially if I’m standing at the We Are Scientists merch booth. Twenty years ago, that would not have been so. Twenty years ago I’d have been pleased to get recognized by someone watching my band play on stage. I mean that literally! If you’re a group in its infancy, even your fans — most of whom will be of the “casual” variety — don’t necessarily know the names of everybody in the band. So if I had been up there on the one-foot-tall stage at The Grog Shop outside of Cleveland opening for Bishop Allen and somebody I didn’t recognize in the audience yelled “Chris!,” I’d have been pretty psyched. (I emphasize that the person should be unknown to me because of course friends, family, and co-headlining band members, who could well have accounted for 80% of the audience, obviously don’t count — fuck those guys!)

Actually, twenty years ago I’d have been pretty psyched to look into the audience and see someone I didn’t recognize.

Nowadays, and for many years now, getting recognized at a We Are Scientists show and addressed familiarly doesn’t seem strange at all, and I think it’s the strangeness that used to create the frisson. So it could still happen, but elsewhere. If I were at a basketball game and my rich friend had somehow gotten us seats just a couple rows off the court, and LeBron James was like, “Chris Cain! Thanks for comin’ out!”, I’d be pleased. Okay, yes, that’s the most famous athlete. But if I were upstairs in that giant hallway that circles the arena and has all the food counters and bathrooms and stuff (there has to be a word for that, but I don’t care what it is), and I was ordering a frozen cherry rum and a hot pretzel, and the cashier said “Chris! Oho my!”, I’d be equally pleased. EQUALLY PLEASED AS IF LEBRON SAID IT, YES I WOULD.

Also, Jason — I just resolved a little internal debate about whether to tell you this — of course I knew who you were. I know who everyone is at a We Are Scientists show, not just their names, but everything about them. Their ticket- and t-shirt-buying history, sure, but also everything everything else. You see, we’re on that Facebook shit. We’ve got your data. We fed you a cookie, and now we can track, trace, tag and release you, and watch you wherever you go. I know your taste in television, your favorite philosopher, your preferred pronouns, and your deadliest desire. Yes, Jason, I know your deadliest desire.

I know the gaffe that haunts you.

Of course I’m not going to USE that information 🤗 — we just like to hold onto it in case. Just in case. Rainy day vibes. Your secrets are safe, etc. ✌🏼

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Ashley Jean inquires, “My bestie, Ashley B, and I are in a constant linguistic battle. Is it really wall ball or handball? A hotdog or a weenie? A semi or a tractor trailer? Water fountain or drinking fountain?

Being that you were both from opposite ends of the country at some point in your lives, have you ever run across this issue in communicating with each other? I don’t think Ashley and I will ever come to terms with our terms (we do agree it should be soda and not pop at least) but I am hopeful another pair of long time besties will help us come to understand each other.”

Chris thinks: Great question, AJ, and in our fast-paced, globalizing world, more and more people will soon be faced with this issue if they aren’t already. First off, a few ground truths:

Wall ball or handball? Two radically different sports.

Hot dog or weenie? Both should be used, alternating roughly 60/40.

Semi or tractor trailer? Haven’t heard of either of these; don’t know what this means; no search results on google or pornhub.

Water fountain or drinking fountain? Bubbler.

But your point is well taken. Even today’s youth (I’m in the process of raising one), hyper-connected as they are, transnational and even international as those connections may be, exhibit parochial vocabularies. Considering the forces of cultural homogenization that seem so effectively to be diluting geographic idiosyncrasy, this is remarkable. The human brain, apparently, wants that idiosyncrasy; it may feed on it. It resists flattening wherever it can, and dialect is the front on which it is combating the invading forces of adulteration more effectively than anywhere else.

So we’re stuck with these linguistic discrepancies, and while we may rightly celebrate them as plucky rebels in the fight against imperial monoculture, that doesn’t mean they’re welcome in our private relationships. As you point out, they can be sources of real friction, and yes, Keith and I often suffer the chaff. What I call a “faucet,” he calls a “spigot.” What I call a “frying pan,” he calls a “skillet.” You know the hard thing in the middle of an apricot? I say “pit”; Keith says it’s the “seed.”

I’ll never forget the evening I met Keith, but not because I had an electric premonition of our life bond, or because he did a one-armed handstand or some shit — no, it’s that he called my desk a “lectern,” and not jokingly, or to seem smart. I’ve still never heard him say “desk.”

I say “you guys” and Keith says “gang.” I say “bucket” and he says “bowl” (yes, for the big thing that holds several gallons of liquid; the giant bowl; the “pail,” some people would say; Keith calls anything bowl- or bucket-shaped, no matter the size, a bowl. A garbage can is “garbage bowl”).

The soda/pop controversy is even messier than you might imagine. For some reason, maybe owing to my motley provenance — born in Montreal to parents from Alabama, childhood in Kansas City, teens in Utah, six years around California followed by 20 in NYC — I’m comfortable with “soda,” “pop,” “soft drink,” “tonic” — whatever you prefer. I find the Texan tendency to call any such drink, regardless of flavor or brand, a “coke” inaccurate in a willful way, but otherwise my instinctual response is to live and let live. Yet I really don’t like that Keith calls it “juice.”

“Juice,” Keith will tell a flight attendant who’s offering him a beverage at 30,000 feet. “What kind? We have apple, orange, and tomato,” she might say. “Coke Zero,” he will reply. 🤦🏽‍♀️

Why not just say Coke Zero from the beginning? I ask him. Because I want to see what they have, he says. But they don’t tell you what they have, cuz they think you’re talking about the liquid essence of fruit, I say. Well, I don’t know that, he responds. You must have noticed a pattern, I insist. What pattern, he says. That no one says juice for carbonated sugar drinks, I say, to which he’ll just shrug, and remind me that I call hats “toppers.”

I don’t have enough battery left on my laptop to catalog the lexical impasses Keith and I run into with our British friends, and I assign no malice here — I’m sure they’re as confounded as we are. But there is a British tendency toward euphemism that I find grating. Let me give you a couple of examples. In England — or much of it, anyway; I know it’s a hyper-variegated rainbow of vernaculars — when a car runs into a person, they will say the person was “knocked down.” Come on. The person, as any North American knows, got smashed. In the interest of objectivity, I acknowledge that both terms focus on only one part of the full picture. When a car runs into a person, first they are knocked down (that is, knocked out of their erect standing position, off of their feet), and then they are smashed. What interests me is that British English focuses on the less messy part — frankly, the less important part. Ask anyone who has had this terrible thing happen to them, “What do you remember most?”, and they’ll say being smashed. The knocking down is almost beside the point, a purely mechanical precursor to the real event.

A few others I’ve noticed: “Tired and emotional” to mean drunk. “Taken ill” to mean poisoned. “Between jobs” to mean working two jobs, in violation of one’s contract with at least one employer. “Comfort break” to refer to taking a nap, naked, on the floor of a bathroom stall. “Lost their lunch” to mean one’s lunch has been stolen.

So at least, Ashley Jean, you and your best friend are from the same country! We must count our blessings, and friendship should perhaps be the most cherished of them all.

That’s a wrap! Thanks for reading — we hope you learned so, so much. Especially about yourself. We have noticed that you remain shockingly without insight when it comes to YOU! That’s okay. You have time. And you’ve come to the right place.

Here’s to the next hundred posts! 🍻

Keith’n’Chris