Surreal

..
Mum’s dad Norman, on the other hand, was as bald as a badger (what does
that mean?) well before he died at the frighteningly young age of 55. I can
remember touching his clammy pate when we were jumping all over him at the end
of the day as he tried to relax with a glass of scotch in his enormous red leather
armchair, the one with the vents in the cushion that sighed satisfyingly when
you sat in it. Or jumped up and down on it. I think it was due to sweat that
his head was so clammy, but it could have been some early hair product employed
to glue down a desperate comb-over.
Skulls.. Hmmm..
I think it was Stephen Fry that alerted me to this bit of recent history that
we tend to overlook these days. It was a quite interesting fact about phrenology,
the practice of interpreting the bumps on people’s skulls, which Arthur
Conan Doyle set great store by apparently, but which is generally discredited
these days, mostly because it was associated with racial stereotyping, which
was seized on by the Nazis, of course.
I thought that was about all there was to it, but I was wrong, because around
about the same time I heard a radio doco about the practice of eugenics and
mass sterilisations in North Carolina in particular, and I was staggered at
how widespread the practice was in the US in general and how long it persisted.
In fact, the sterilisation program in North Carolina lasted from 1933 to 1977,
but it seems of all the thirty-two states that adopted similar programs, laid
back and groovy California was the most avid practitioner of compulsory sterilisation
– there were reportedly 20,000 such procedures authorised between 1909
and the mid-sixties. (See Wikipedia)
I need to pause for breath here, because I have to adjust my view of the leader
of the Free World yet again. But we should remember that Australia’s Stolen
Generations policy was also guided by those same principles of eugenics.
While these state endorsed programs have largely disappeared, there’s
another related problem I read about just today under the heading Disabled
‘sterilised illegally’
Parents and carers of the disabled are regularly doctor shopping and going
abroad to have their children sterilised illegally, according to the Australian
Human Rights Commission.
Under Australian law, only the Family Court or a guardianship tribunal can authorise
the irreversible medical procedure.
But national Disability Discrimination Commissioner Graeme Innes said anecdotal
evidence suggested unauthorised non-therapeutic and forced sterilisation were
still common in Australia.
Mr Innes is seeking to have the practice criminalised, with penalties as harsh
as imprisonment. read
more

It’s all too depressing really. But wasn’t this P&W supposed
to be about something trivial?
Oh right – surreal.
Well, the evolution/corruption of the English language is just another irritant
for us hapless baby-boomers as we slide into the abyss of irrelevance, just
as it has been for hundreds of successive generations of English speakers.
The latest word I’ve detected being devalued by its misuse and/or overuse
is ‘surreal’. ‘It was bloody surreal’, he said at
the end of the footy match. ‘It was surreal’, describing a car
accident. ‘It was surreal’, describing Spectrum’s recent
appearance on the LWTTT tour.
I would accept ‘unreal’, which itself was done over thoroughly
in the ‘70s. ‘Surreal’, however, has a quite specific meaning,
of which I’m sure you’re aware, but I was going to expand on it
anyway – until I got side-tracked again.