Instinct, basically!
Instinct:
"Inborn pattern of behaviour often responsive to specific stimuli"
Basic:
"Of Primary Importance"
There are many meanings of the word, but this one is the one used in most contexts.
However, when basic is allied with 'ally', it throws in a while new term into the picture. One which infuses dread into the minds of all those people with a reasonable vocabulary, one that is used as a popular conversational catch-phrase or a random filler while talking.
Yup. 'Basically'.
Along with a whole host of other terms, this word has also crept up into corporate jargon to such a great extent, that some people who are in the recruitment industry will actually give you more 'leverage' while you go ahead and apply for a plum IT posting. The copious amount of senseless jargon does not 'add value' under any circumstance, but the speaker generally assumes that he becomes much more cooler, and feels much more in place with his peers, who also speak this way to try and fit in.
College slang, on the other hand, is cool. No two ways about it.
Even when you're sixty-five and balding, it can get you brownie points with your grandchildren, when you narrate to them funny instances about how smart you were in college, and about how you came up with esoteric utterances that bamboozled everyone but those in your immediate close circle.
Chances are, they'll think you're off your rocker. But you'll gain a newfound respect from them. The fact that they'll think you're off your rocker anyway is a given, given the amount of time you've been around.
In fact, there is even some firang woman who thought it was cool enough and came up with a PhD thesis on IITM lingo. Read more about it here.
Coming back to jargon, there is more of it than you could imagine. Its a mind-boggling thing, how people sit at their cubicles pretending to work, while doing something as utterly wasteful as conjuring up arbit jargon, or worse - blogging. Heh.
Phrases such as 'like', 'if you look at', 'in terms of', 'actually' and the currently ubiquitous 'per se' are thrown around with gay abandon, pretty much like vitriolic anti-Israeli statement at every Palestinian birth, wedding and funeral ceremony. Nevermind the fact that the most elementary nuances of grammar have been discarded. Nevermind the fact that it will not make any sense whatsoever even to the person who made these profound utterances.
Catch phrases are here to stay, and can be exemplied by this particular snippet I actually had to endure during some status meeting (the last one I have attended, since the past five months).
"See, basically, this week I had to actually implement this yada yada yada per se, though like, you know, if you look at it in terms of yada yada yada, scheduled status yada like, means if you look at it per se objectively yada yada. So, basically, if you look at, like.....yeah." (Silence, I wait to run away, catchphrase man waits for applause. To think he was hired for his communication skills is as probable as I was hired for effectively using my time at the office to write code.)
Catch phrase genius actually ended his statement to the entire team with that very line. Yes, ladies and gentlemen. Leave apart sentence completion, I doubt he'd even recognize correct grammar if it looked like Carmen Elektra and was naked, hanging upside-down from a tree and staring right at his face.
And to think people wonder why everyone wants to leave the IT industry in droves, like lemmings on one of their mass suicide drives. If you're a techie, chances are, you'd never even have figured out the fact that I even began the previous sentence with a coordinating conjunction, which is not strictly correct, in the truest sense of language usage.
Of all the things, 'basically' is basically tolerable, since a whole lot of quizzers 'put' that sort of expression anyway.
Among other things I want to rant about are the fact that Basic Instinct has a sequel, and its called Risk Addiction. Talk about milking a fourteen-year old phenomenon to the max.
The phenomenally famous Catherine Tramell crossing and uncrossing her legs was the stuff that had fuelled the adolescent fantasies of all red-blooded men. The movie also had fond memories for a whole lot of other reasons.
One of them was the fact that my dumb C's partner-in-crime, Rana and I managed to win the mech section 'B' batch of 2005 dumb C's championship restricted to four teams with one round to spare. The 'championship' was conducted under a failing tubelight outside our college block due to the fact that classrooms had to be closed, and when Rana enacted the movie, imitating the crossing legs pose, there was only one thing that came to mind. Two seconds later, we were entitled to enough cash to buy and share a 1.5 litre Mirinda bottle. Yay!
For that matter, for a whole lot of people who know who Sharon Stone is, that is probably the thing she's most remembered for. This movie was also on my must-watch-when-folks-are-not-at-home movie list, given the fact that our telly was in a place where anyone could walk into the room at any possible time, which meant that I had to exercise the utmost amount of caution I could muster.
I had to contend myself with watching the movie on Star Movies, which, as a matter of policy, stopped the screening of steaming hot movies, EXACTLY at the very time when I hit puberty and was most keen on watching them. Renting the movie from a video store was suicidal, given that Mysore is a very small place, and something as innocuous as farting loudly on the street parallel to the one where your house was located, was enough for concerned ladies to call up my Mum to give her suggestions about issues related to my digestive tract ("He might not be too old for Woodward's gripe water......." - get the picture? ).
Under those circumstances, when concerned video parlour guys were wise-asses who knew your Dad well enough, it was courting disaster to actually want to rent an adult movie, let alone a porn one. Resourceful classmates, coupled with the thirst for knowledge, eventually resulted in being able to watch all the right stuff without too much trouble, thank God.
The version I saw on star movies was hugely edited, and Sharon Stone's famous scene was so badly mauled, that as soon as she began uncrossing her legendary legs, there was a cut, and her legs were crossed the other way. To compound my misery, the swear words and the other dirty stuff that she supposedly said (I still don't know) was all blanked out.
Due to all these censorship norms, Basic Instinct on Star Movies ran for 13 minutes and 26 seconds.
Anyway, here we are, fourteen years later, with the sequel. With all due respect to people who like watching extremely old post-menopausal once-upon-a-time-extremely-hot women on screen pretending to be horny, the entire idea sucks! If I ever were to bring myself to watch the movie (unlikely, unless we had an office team outing to the theatre), which I'd do only if I had nothing else to do and someone was giving me a free ticket, free Mirinda, free pop-corn, free transport to and from the multiplex and some good company, I'd probably be sitting and counting the wrinkles on Sharon Stone's face, as opposed to focussing on the movie.
One could draw similar parallels about people trying to cash in on erstwhile popularity for a last ditch attempt. Here are some examples:
"Inborn pattern of behaviour often responsive to specific stimuli"
Basic:
"Of Primary Importance"
There are many meanings of the word, but this one is the one used in most contexts.
However, when basic is allied with 'ally', it throws in a while new term into the picture. One which infuses dread into the minds of all those people with a reasonable vocabulary, one that is used as a popular conversational catch-phrase or a random filler while talking.
Yup. 'Basically'.
Along with a whole host of other terms, this word has also crept up into corporate jargon to such a great extent, that some people who are in the recruitment industry will actually give you more 'leverage' while you go ahead and apply for a plum IT posting. The copious amount of senseless jargon does not 'add value' under any circumstance, but the speaker generally assumes that he becomes much more cooler, and feels much more in place with his peers, who also speak this way to try and fit in.
College slang, on the other hand, is cool. No two ways about it.
Even when you're sixty-five and balding, it can get you brownie points with your grandchildren, when you narrate to them funny instances about how smart you were in college, and about how you came up with esoteric utterances that bamboozled everyone but those in your immediate close circle.
Chances are, they'll think you're off your rocker. But you'll gain a newfound respect from them. The fact that they'll think you're off your rocker anyway is a given, given the amount of time you've been around.
In fact, there is even some firang woman who thought it was cool enough and came up with a PhD thesis on IITM lingo. Read more about it here.
Coming back to jargon, there is more of it than you could imagine. Its a mind-boggling thing, how people sit at their cubicles pretending to work, while doing something as utterly wasteful as conjuring up arbit jargon, or worse - blogging. Heh.
Phrases such as 'like', 'if you look at', 'in terms of', 'actually' and the currently ubiquitous 'per se' are thrown around with gay abandon, pretty much like vitriolic anti-Israeli statement at every Palestinian birth, wedding and funeral ceremony. Nevermind the fact that the most elementary nuances of grammar have been discarded. Nevermind the fact that it will not make any sense whatsoever even to the person who made these profound utterances.
Catch phrases are here to stay, and can be exemplied by this particular snippet I actually had to endure during some status meeting (the last one I have attended, since the past five months).
"See, basically, this week I had to actually implement this yada yada yada per se, though like, you know, if you look at it in terms of yada yada yada, scheduled status yada like, means if you look at it per se objectively yada yada. So, basically, if you look at, like.....yeah." (Silence, I wait to run away, catchphrase man waits for applause. To think he was hired for his communication skills is as probable as I was hired for effectively using my time at the office to write code.)
Catch phrase genius actually ended his statement to the entire team with that very line. Yes, ladies and gentlemen. Leave apart sentence completion, I doubt he'd even recognize correct grammar if it looked like Carmen Elektra and was naked, hanging upside-down from a tree and staring right at his face.
And to think people wonder why everyone wants to leave the IT industry in droves, like lemmings on one of their mass suicide drives. If you're a techie, chances are, you'd never even have figured out the fact that I even began the previous sentence with a coordinating conjunction, which is not strictly correct, in the truest sense of language usage.
Of all the things, 'basically' is basically tolerable, since a whole lot of quizzers 'put' that sort of expression anyway.
Among other things I want to rant about are the fact that Basic Instinct has a sequel, and its called Risk Addiction. Talk about milking a fourteen-year old phenomenon to the max.
The phenomenally famous Catherine Tramell crossing and uncrossing her legs was the stuff that had fuelled the adolescent fantasies of all red-blooded men. The movie also had fond memories for a whole lot of other reasons.
One of them was the fact that my dumb C's partner-in-crime, Rana and I managed to win the mech section 'B' batch of 2005 dumb C's championship restricted to four teams with one round to spare. The 'championship' was conducted under a failing tubelight outside our college block due to the fact that classrooms had to be closed, and when Rana enacted the movie, imitating the crossing legs pose, there was only one thing that came to mind. Two seconds later, we were entitled to enough cash to buy and share a 1.5 litre Mirinda bottle. Yay!
For that matter, for a whole lot of people who know who Sharon Stone is, that is probably the thing she's most remembered for. This movie was also on my must-watch-when-folks-are-not-at-home movie list, given the fact that our telly was in a place where anyone could walk into the room at any possible time, which meant that I had to exercise the utmost amount of caution I could muster.
I had to contend myself with watching the movie on Star Movies, which, as a matter of policy, stopped the screening of steaming hot movies, EXACTLY at the very time when I hit puberty and was most keen on watching them. Renting the movie from a video store was suicidal, given that Mysore is a very small place, and something as innocuous as farting loudly on the street parallel to the one where your house was located, was enough for concerned ladies to call up my Mum to give her suggestions about issues related to my digestive tract ("He might not be too old for Woodward's gripe water......." - get the picture? ).
Under those circumstances, when concerned video parlour guys were wise-asses who knew your Dad well enough, it was courting disaster to actually want to rent an adult movie, let alone a porn one. Resourceful classmates, coupled with the thirst for knowledge, eventually resulted in being able to watch all the right stuff without too much trouble, thank God.
The version I saw on star movies was hugely edited, and Sharon Stone's famous scene was so badly mauled, that as soon as she began uncrossing her legendary legs, there was a cut, and her legs were crossed the other way. To compound my misery, the swear words and the other dirty stuff that she supposedly said (I still don't know) was all blanked out.
Due to all these censorship norms, Basic Instinct on Star Movies ran for 13 minutes and 26 seconds.
Anyway, here we are, fourteen years later, with the sequel. With all due respect to people who like watching extremely old post-menopausal once-upon-a-time-extremely-hot women on screen pretending to be horny, the entire idea sucks! If I ever were to bring myself to watch the movie (unlikely, unless we had an office team outing to the theatre), which I'd do only if I had nothing else to do and someone was giving me a free ticket, free Mirinda, free pop-corn, free transport to and from the multiplex and some good company, I'd probably be sitting and counting the wrinkles on Sharon Stone's face, as opposed to focussing on the movie.
One could draw similar parallels about people trying to cash in on erstwhile popularity for a last ditch attempt. Here are some examples:
- Gary Coleman (of that American sitcom Diff'rent Strokes, yup, the chubby cute African-American kid) running for the post of Governor of California in the 2003 elections and coming 8th
- Ramanand Sagar's Ramayana, which ran on and on and on and on. It was supposed to end with Sita being consumed by the earth after proving her chastity in the trial by fire, but Sagar thought it was actually convenient, and with appropriately long flashbacks, even had a further addition of episodes, including the ones with Luv-Kush.
- Sabeer Bhatia starting arzoo.com (though he must be lauded for his entrepreneural idea, all the same)
- Real Madrid still selling t-shirts like hot-cakes, despite performances that are so dismal, that their fans will require a chicken soup book dedicated to them.
- Finally, a certain Arnold Schwarzzeneger, whose most famous statement till date 'I'll be back', running for the post of Governor of California and actually winning it!
posted by Hari Shenoy @ 9:41 PM
5 Comments:
i feel dizzy...
it could be because, basically there is too much info in this post. but, like, it's very interesting, yeah? good job, kudos to you! for being an example for adding value to content in the web, in terms of, er, leveraging quality. i mean, like, the general stuff you get to read in blogs.
and yeah, if you really look at it in terms of age, sharon stone IS very old actually, tryin to look hot and all.
er, did i pass the catch phrase genius test?
;)
u make me wish i'd written this post.
ok..so...like...yea
dude.. this blog was too long.. and u've insulted dr. sharon stonekumar.. i will come there and bash you.. nan magane..!!
yqmpbehx
oh oh oh
cats are totally, like, way good therapy, but, like, your blog comes tootin' close.
i mean, basically, thanks for the pick-me-up :)
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