Thursday, November 12, 2009

D-File!

I am considering offering myself to the Guiding Association as a 'rudeness consultant'. Flora recently joined and was given a very trendy little booklet called The G-File. The name immediately made me flinch slightly, with it's unfortunate amalgam of elements of G-Spot and, er, paedophile.

I imagine people with cleaner minds will now be saying 'I didn't see that at all. It just made me think of 'gee whizz' and nail-file'. Ah dear innocents, you are losing out on a whole world of smuttiness. I recently stopped the car to take a photo of a van belonging to a company called Tracklube who dealt in 'flange lubrication'. Oh how I chortled to myself - it really made my day.

Returning to the G-File, it's clear that the Guiding Association failed to take advice from people with fertile imaginations such as mine. I would have warned them, advising them to choose something slightly less dubious sounding such as The Guide Guide for instance. I like that, it says what it is, the repetition of the word Guide has that ironic, noughties feel about it and most importantly it plays with notions of meaning in a satisfyingly post-structuralist way; it says what it does on the tin but the tin is just a linguistic construct anyway and has no essential tin-ness about it. So there is no meaning which means there is no need to come to Guides and get badges because language is slippery and therefore you haven't got a badge anyway but something that isn't a dog or a kettle..... Fantastic!

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