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January 27, 2007
bastard language
We had a good seminar over the pizza. The kids ordered The Truman Show and when we settled down to watch it, we opened the box to find they’d sent us The Wind That Shakes The Barley instead. Good for me and Ohna but not for the kids, so we decided to watch East is East instead. Just the thing for tonight. Not an absolutely great movie but loads of good acting and writing and directing.
One of the most obvious linguistic features is the use of ‘bastard’ in phrases like ‘bastard hippie’. Once we’d established that describing doesn’t make a word an adjective (you can describe people by saying ‘bastards’’), we noticed the word kept appearing in adjective position but also that no-one ever says ‘bastarder’ or ‘bastardest’.
There’s loads of good dialogue, but I think my second-favourite bit was when Tariq packed a suitcase and rushed out of the house:
Saleem: Where you goin?
Tariq: Nowhere
Saleem: Wait for me!
Meenah: Where you going?
Tariq: Nowhere
Meenah: I’ll come with you
My absolute favourite moment was of course the flying fanny and the absolute best line was the ‘fanny over your bastard head’ one
B-)
Posted by Billy at January 27, 2007 9:45 PM
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