“Oh man, our acceptably low murder
rates and high quality of life sure rock. They're totally gnarly.”
A statement like that occurred all throughout malls in the mid-1990s.
However, the following statement
occurred throughout the 2000s all the way through today.
“Oh man, our unacceptably high murder
rates and low quality of life sure suck. They're totally gnarly.”
In just a matter of ten years, the
entire sentence has flip flopped upon itself. What's bad is good,
what's good is bad. We thought we'd reached the top, but we're on the
bottom. Most unacceptable though is how the word “gnarly” has
become a negative, when it's such a gnarly word that nobody should
ever negate its gnarlsomeness.
The circa 1940s British government already seems on-board with this gnarly idea. |
Now, this might just be my “Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtle”-addled brain at work here, but I think the
downfall of modern society is directly related to how un-gnarly the
world has become. Oh, just to be clear, in the previous statement,
I'm using the classic definition of gnarly, not the new one, which
would have made a double negative—totally ungnarly.
And it's because of this, I'm taking
back gnarly. It's far too neat of a word to let negative Nancies
co-opt. It would be totally radical if we push such a keen word back
into everyday use. In such an ungnarly world like this one, there's
bound to be pushback as people refuse to renege on their gnarly ways
(using current definition). It will be hard making them renege, but
ultimately we'll find it quite gnarly.
One of the things standing in the way
of bringing such an awesome word is how un-adverbable it is. You
can't really do something in a gnarly fashion, unless you really want
to gnarlyily slap someone a high five. But once we solve that
problem, the way is paved for it to be used to describe just about
anything. He gnarlyily ate that pudding. He gnarlily turned into a
troll. He gnarlyily made a word ending in ly into an adverb.
If only there were a band with "gnarl" in the name that didn't feature the host of a second-rate talent show. |
We can also put up a page on Wikipedia
attesting to the awesomeness of the word gnarly. As it stands, there
currently isn't a page proclaiming this, and for someone writing a
500-word entry about the word “gnarly” where the other 450 words
have to feature content, this makes things a bit tough. But if we
have a gnarly page, this will quite literally help get the word out
there.
Reanimating the corpse of Bob Marley
and making him tour as “Bob Gnarly” will also help our cause.
Some squares might say that simply
creating an adverb, editing a publicly editable page or dabbling in
the black arts is no way to gain widespread acceptance for an archaic
word. It is gnarly how much people hate using grammar and how people
question reanimation. I can dig that, but it's what we need to do to
get the nerd populace on board. Once we have the grammar nerds, we
can pull in the normal nerds. And from there, it's just a couple
steps before we're living in a gnarly world once again.
Good gnarly, not bad gnarly.
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