The foolish will always be with us

STYLE, NOVEMBER 2000

EVERYBODY, IT SOMETIMES seems, is trying to give up something. Some people are trying to give up the second helping of ice cream, some are trying to give up Internet porn, some people – alas, not enough – are trying to give up saying the phrase “Don’t go there”. I can only encourage more good citizens to join the fight against “Don’t even go there!” Wear ribbons pinned to your shirts, get yourself a hotline – we need to stamp out the scourge. It is not hip. It doesn’t make you sound like Queen Latifah or Jennifer Lopez. It makes you sound like Mrs Huxtable on The Cosby Show.

And don’t get me started on the habit – so enthusiastically championed by Shaleen Surtie-Richards, that sounding leviathan of the linguistic deep –of exclaiming “Hel-lo !” It’s hard to explain precisely what “Hel-lo !” means, although you would recognise it if you heard it. It is generally uttered in a sort of sarcastic Californian accent, and it is intended to indicate your vast fund of common sense and finger-snapping street-smarts: “People tell me I’m a good conversationalist. Hel-lo ! I knew that!” It is the modern version of the word “Duh!”, and it is so annoying it can make a grown man weep.

The worst thing about such lapses of good sense is that they are not confined solely to imbeciles. The people who say these things aren’t only the kind of folk who wear stretch-pants beyond the age of 24, or who collect the soundtracks of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals, or who name their children Jarrod or Savannah, or who have their own talk shows on television. Some of them are in every way decent, likeable, unexceptionable individuals who suddenly, for no clear reason, lapse into the worst failure of taste.

It is a common phenomenon. Consider the perfectly sensible man, earning a good living, surrounded by a loving family, who one morning wakes up and decides to grow a moustache. Consider Mike Haysman’s hairstyle. Consider the otherwise professional businesswoman, responsible and well-regarded by her peers, who takes it into her head that a cellphone that rings with the title track of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is both quirky and entertaining.

There is no word in English that adequately describes these unpredictable social atrocities, so I have had to borrow one from the Italians. The word I have selected is culacino. Strictly speaking, it refers to the mark that is left by a wet glass placed on a table, but I like the sound of it anyway. A culacino can crop up anywhere. It can be a thing: a Best of Queen CD lurking in a music collection, a Jack Kerouac paperback, a ponytail, a pendant with your name written in hieroglyphics, a patchwork leather jacket. A culacino can be an action: ordering a Jack Daniel’s and Coca-Cola, or telling a tale at the dinner table that involves your sexual habits during the 18 months when you were single. Worst of all, though, a culacino is an indelible Freudian slip, a moment of madness offering an insight past the civilised mask, into the terrible beigeness of the human heart.

The reason I raise all this is that a good friend of mine is considering ordering personalised licence plates. It is a source of tremendous anxiety. Can I still be the friend of a man with personalised licence plates? If so, do I run the risk of one day waking and thinking to myself, “I know, I’ll get myself a licence plate with Untitled written on it. That’ll be cool!?”

Let’s get this straight: personalised licence plates are the worst kind of culacino. They are bumper stickers that cost R3000. They are fluffy Garfield toys stuck to the rear window with plastic suction cups. The kind of man who would have a personalised licence plate is the kind of man who would carry a plastic Porsche keyring. I say “man” but I am being unfair – you can bet your last glue-on fingernail that Felicia has a set of personalised plates.

Appalling as the very notion is, worse is the kind of guff that people select for their plates. 007 – there’s an original thought. 140MPH – ooh, you devil. The new generation of personal plates specialise in words, allowing middle-aged men to call themselves STUD or PYTHON on national roads. Even more dire is when they take the opportunity to make private jokes with their pals. I saw one sad specimen with a plate proudly announcing: LUNCH. Was he a pizza deliveryman specialising in midday service? Was he a dyslexic member of the Ku Klux Klan? Had BREAKFAST already been taken? Who cares. Yep, buddy, that was worth every cent of R3000. It saved you having to find a T-shirt saying TOSSER.