--- Dan Frost <danielfrost at yahoo.com> wrote: > >
Marshall Mathers is a product of his environment.
> Eminem/Slim shady is a
> character. 'We' find it hard to swallow the idea of
> a character that is
> seperate from the actor, yet type-cast, in anything
> other than film.
>
yah bollocks. It's very hard to exapnd "is a product of his environment" into anything that isn't either vapid, offensive, untrue or various linear combinations of the three. Why not say he's a product of his genes, for which there's just as much evidence.
The actual explanation is one that I think I can take credit for having predicted about five years ago. It's quite clear that the swearing vocabulary has been suffering from hyperinflation over the last few years; one doesn't have to be Charles Murray to agree that, as an empirical fact, the word "fuck" has lost an awful lot of its value. In order to continue offending people at the old levels, the community of people who want to be offensive basically had two options;
First, to move onto the word "cunt" as the swearword of choice. This policy has a number of disadvantages; it's a noun rather than a verb, and the final glottal stop makes it difficult to pronounce if you add suffixes (compare "fucked", "fucking"). Furthermore, the short term pain of being _more_ offensive than one wold perhaps like to be would imnpose a fairly large transition cost. So we can see this solution as analogous to a country with an inflation problem deciding to jack up short term interest rates and deflate.
The second solution would be to move on to the racial and homosexual epithets -- the equivalent of a devaluation of the currency, because it attempts to shift the pain of adjustment onto a different group. I (apparently correctly) assumed that this would be the policy followed. So we can see Eminem as the human equivalent of a barrowload of Turkish Lira.
Personally, I made up my mind to accept the lowered purchasing power of the word "fuck" and maintain my level of offence by becoming more directly personal in my insults, but we supporters of fiscal rectitude and supply-side reform are fewer and fewer these days.
dd, brain slightly warped by triple results yesterday.
===== "Imagine the Duchess's feelings You could have pierced her with swords To find her youngest son liked Lenin And sold the Daily Worker near the House of Lords" -- Noel Coward
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