Wednesday 15 July 2009

Ahhhrrrr N B


Sometimes the English language seems properly weird to me. Like the evolution of some words, the way they start off meaning one thing and end up meaning something else completely different is just mental. I mean I've spoken and written in this stuff for twenty odd years man and boy, but I swear, how the word 'booty' ever made it's way from the world of seventeenth century piracy on the high seas, only to eventually finish up becoming the staple term for a woman's backside in the massively oversexed, dry-humpathon which passes for R&B music these days, is a total mystery to me. Bizarre. Suppose booty had had the same dual meaning all those hundreds of years ago; it would've just been utterly unworkable.

Say you're a pirate right and you're sitting in a tavern when some grizzly old seadog – you know the sort: bad cough, walking stick, eye patch, parrot, the works – hobbles up to you. Says he's a sick man, dying, too feeble now for sea faring and thus he's willing to part with his most coveted possession in return for one last mug o' grog. You agree and the reward turns out to be a treasure map with a very convincing back story to it. So you spend the next couple of months and every last penny you can beg, borrow or steal chartering a good sized ship and hiring a tough but capable crew. Setting sail in due course, you spend most of the ensuing year on a hellish voyage; fighting ferocious seas, fending off rival pirates, battling the Royal Navy and quashing countless mutinies onboard your own vessel by the treacherous crew. Even when you do ultimately reach the strange island detailed on the map, there's still the numerous hostile natives to be disposed of and dozens of brain melting clues to solve before you can pin point the exact location of that all important 'X.' At long last though, after days of navigating through terrain as baffling as it is dangerous, you locate the proverbial sweet spot and start digging. You dig for hours non-stop, without sleeping, all night, into the early hours of the morning. You're exhausted but determined so you just keep on digging, digging, digging, digging, digging, digging until you finally hit…an arse.

A woman's arse. That's all. Just a woman's arse, sticking up out the sand. It's a very nice arse, sure there's no denying it, almost worth singing about even, but that's got to be small consolation after you risked life and limb travelling all this way – after all, that kind of booty isn't going to pay many ransoms or bounties now is it? Imagine the disappointment.

Mind you, thinking on it now, there is another thing that Mr Timberlake and the like have in common with pirates aside from the love of booty - they could both use a shower. A extremely cold one in the case of the R&B artists, if only to calm those dirty rascals down for five minutes and any sort of shower for the pirates really, just to spruce them up a bit.

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