Academic Conference Number One

My uncle’s off to a conference next week. Says it’s terribly important, they’re going to be discussing structure and meaning in Proto-Indo-European. He says PIE is the future of communication. I told him in plain speaking, what a lot of bears’ bollocks! PIE in the sky, eh? Look - when I speak I know what I mean, know what I mean? No need for analysis, parsing, declensions, gender agreements, all that Auroch’s poop. It’s as plain as that thing in the middle of your face.

But there’s no arguing with my uncle. Not long ago he got into trouble at a feast, in his beakers and speaking in joined-up wordstream. Pretty soon the Team Leader was roaring, “There’s not going to be no fucking Aorist Subjunctive in my tribal community, or my name isn’t….. er, whatever!” Then he farted with such cataclysmic articulacy he nearly blew out the campfire. I know, it’s dreadful sacrilege to moon at the divine flames, but actually the only retribution was a herd of ibex fell off the mountain, so we were eating stringy meat and carving horn trinkets for months.

Laugh was, everybody here is either Mr. Ugg Hunter or Mrs. Fat-Arse Gatherer, so forgetting his own name wasn’t a brilliant move, although of course the farting was considered extremely witty. I thought some of the older people would die laughing, and come to think of it there did seem to be more thirty-somethings than usual lying stone dead by the fire the morning after the feasting.

But my uncle wasn’t put out. He just smiled that smile of his and said, “Well, of course, if matters had been otherwise I might have acted differently.”

So clever, him and his pals. They’ll be off junketing for seven solar cycles at the very least, and meanwhile who’s going to meet their flint-flaking quotas? Us! What’s more we’ll all have to subscribe bagfuls of cowrie shells and cult objects to pay for their conferring and whoring. Then they’ll come back full of intransigence and irregular verbs, acting all superior, insisting adjectives are better than axe-heads.

Worst of all they’ll look down on people like me who actually produce the things that are worth talking about, and try to teach us the stuff they’ve only just made up, calling it by their own names like my grannie’s gran-mére and my nephew’s Sin-Tax, who got that tag because he’s always having to pay ten or twenty cowrie shells to girls to compensate for unexpectedly falling pregnant, of course some of them try that one about virgin birth, and start new religions - there’s no end to transactional leverage and market share niche-innovation once you get started.

But here comes my old mate Wheelwright, how’s that for a meaningless name! Says he’s had a really good idea – what else is new? - so we’re off for a chat down at the Spring Bar, if we can drag his cart that far.

Copyright © Donnie Ross 2010