Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride

April 19, 2010

No, “Jim Jones and the Sandinistas” is not the name of my new punk band but feel free to mock up an album cover and send it to me.

No, it is the title of another blog where I get all cranky, crusty, and curmudgeonly about the sorry state of the English language. (See that cool alliteration? That’s why I can beef about other people’s grammar; I know my shit.)

Anywho (way, whatever,) the first thing that flies up my nostril lately is the term “drinking the Kool-Aid,” as in “Wow, you must have really been drinking Omar Minaya’s Kool-Aid if you thought that John Maine could be a number two starter.” It does not, however, refer to Jimmie “J.J.” Walker from Good Times.

Generally, “drinking the Kool-Aid” means to fall for someone’s line of bullshit. It has become a fairly prevalent phrase, to the point that you can’t listen to an episode of Mike Francessa on WFAN without hearing him say it a couple of times an hour. The show is unlistenable in many other ways too, and the irony here is that the listeners have fallen for his line of bullshit, but that’s beside the point.

So why does it bug me? It bugs me because it casually trivializes the deaths of over 900 people.

From Wikipedia, also a pet peeve of mine, but let’s skip that for now:

James Warren “Jim” Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, which is best known for the November 18, 1978 death of more than 900 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana along with the deaths of nine other people at a nearby airstrip and in Georgetown, Guyana.

Jones was a well-connected paranoid communist, who formed a commune to live in “pure socialism and communism.” He had some very kooky theories and managed to form a devoted cult around his strong personality. There were many allegations of vilolence and abuse within, leading to the shooting of a U.S. Congressman. More from Wikipedia:

Later that same day, 909 inhabitants of Jonestown,^, 276 of them children, died of apparent cyanide poisoning, mostly in and around a pavilion. No video was taken during the mass suicide, though the FBI did recover a 45 minute audio recording of the suicide in progress.

On that tape, Jones tells Temple members that the Soviet Union, with whom the Temple had been negotiating a potential exodus for months, would not take them after the Temple had murdered Ryan and four others at a nearby airstrip.  The reason given by Jones to commit suicide was consistent with his previously stated conspiracy theories of intelligence organizations allegedly conspiring against the Temple, that men would “parachute in here on us,” “shoot some of our innocent babies” and “they’ll torture our children, they’ll torture some of our people here, they’ll torture our seniors.”

Given that reasoning, Jones and several members argued that the group should commit “revolutionary suicide” by drinking cyanide-laced grape flavored Flavor Aid (often misidentified as Kool-Aid) along with a sedative.

Over 900 people died. Granted, they were over 900 wacky cult people with bizarre beliefs, but they were people nonetheless, and nearly one third of them were children. I don’t see the point in trivializing their deaths.

I’m just sorry that the good people at Kool-Aid were dragged into the whole mess.

The second thing that bugs me (in terms of grammar. There are a ton of other things that bug me.) is the term “fashionista,” as in a “soldier in the fashion war,” or “one who shops for fashion strongly and mercilessly.”

We’re talking about fashion here folks, so calm down. Ever see Fashion Week in NYC? Skinny models who look like they could use a good steak strutting down the runway, eyes glazed straight ahead, wearing coats that looks like they are made out of tin foil and straw, with what appears to be a stuffed kangaroo folded into a hat on their heads.

Yeah, we need that. Speaking as a guy, finding a clean sweatshirt somewhere in the closet is fashion enough.

None of that, however, is my real problem with the term fashionista. The suffix “-ista” means “one who works in the area of or represents or participates in.” Unlike the suffix “-ist,” it has a negative connotation. It usually refers to those with a “fanatical devotion.” Though it derives from Latin, it came into general usage with the word “Sandinista” in the 1980’s.

More from Wiki:

The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Spanish: Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or FSLN) is a socialist socialist political party in Nicaragua. Its members are called Sandinistas in both English and Spanish.

In March 1982 the Sandinistas declared an official State of Emergency. They argued that this was a response to attacks by counter-revolutionary forces.  

Under the new “Law for the Maintenance of Order and Public Security” the “Tribunales Populares Anti-Somozistas” allowed for the indefinite holding of suspected counter-revolutionaries without trial. The State of Emergency, however, most notably affected rights and guarantees contained in the “Statute on Rights and Guarantees of Nicaraguans.  Many civil liberties were curtailed or canceled such as the freedom to organize demonstrations, the inviolability of the home, freedom of the press, freedom of speech and, the freedom to strike.

All independent news program broadcasts were suspended.

The State of Emergency was not lifted during the 1984 elections. There were many instances where rallies of opposition parties were physically broken up by Sandinsta youth or pro-Sandinista mobs.

On October 5, 1985 the Sandinistas broadened the 1982 State of Emergency and suspended many more civil rights.

Time magazine in 1983 published reports of human rights violations in an article which stated that “According to Nicaragua’s Permanent Commission on Human Rights, the regime detains several hundred people a month; about half of them are eventually released, but the rest simply disappear.”

Isn’t it cute that here in America we can take such horrible abuse of civil rights and turn it into a nice catchy phrase for T.J. Maxx?

The problem with the English language is not with the English language at all. It is with the lack of knowledge, or historical background, of the average person. When a society gets to the point that mass suicide and “disappearances” become fodder for television commercials for cheap blouses, something is very wrong.

I’m doing all I can. I haven’t used the term “hyperizin’ ill-dunkification!” since February first.

Tags: alliteration, bmj2k, cults, english, fashion week, fashionista, Flavor-Aid, grammar, hyperizin' ill-dunkification, Jim Jones, John Maine, Jonestown, Kool-Aid, Mike Francessa, Mr. Blog, Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride, Mr. Language person, Omar Minaya, Sandinista, T.J. Maxx, WFAN