Idle State

Smash! has become my new, favourite, expression.

I used Smash! a few weeks ago to describe what had happened to the display on my much beloved Apple Powerbook. I'm not at all happy, actually, about the smashing of the display. Not a good year for me and LCD panels, it seems, given the GPS slash Dog slash LCD episode a few months ago.

Several people, of now dubious friendship status and also with rather mediocre taste in computers, have made statements - to paraphrase - "well what's so great about these Apple machines if yours now has a broken display." Note that they also didn't use the rather evocative word "smashed" but rather the somewhat weaker and more cowardly "broken" as if to already concede that they didn't really have a very substantial argument, anyway.

I've got to admit that, prima facie, empirical evidence does tend to suggest that bouncing a PowerBook on the floor does appear to show the unit as being marginally less than robust. The truth of the matter is different. In it's splendid three year life, my PowerBook has crashed off my desk to the floor on several occasions, slid around the back seat and onto the floor of the car, been used in the rain, had several heavy items dropped onto it causing various dents and scratches and been unceremoniously dumped on the floor of many airline lounges (admittedly, in an STM bag) when the miles all became a bit much for yours truly. Although it has a few battle scars the machine was, in truth, fairly tricky to break. My friend, ex-housemate and all round great-guy, Darren Yap, always commented that my Mac had "street cred" because of it's scars from a well used, been-around-the-block-a-few-times, rough and tumble existence. It fascinated him, in a kind of I can't look away from this car accident way. God knows why. Bless him.

In the end, it took virtually throwing the machine, due to it slipping out of my hand mid-stride, onto a tiled concrete floor to break the display panel which now looks like some kind of fractal enhanced tartan. The machine still works just fine - without even one extra dent on the case.

Ok. Back to Smash!

A friend of mine - who is Lebanese (if I have the Arabic right -"min Liban") who does a great job of speaking English as a second language asked "what happen [sic] to your laptop?" I have to say, I really love his quirky English - mostly because he speaks English well enough that we rarely have confusion over comprehension but the small errors make his English quite endearing - like the occasional missing or extraneous "-ed" suffix and so on. Like "I just woked up" and "it just stop working" to name a couple.

So the conversation went something like this:

Friend: "What happen to your laptop?"
Me (smiling just a little) "It's happened. You would say, 'what happened to your laptop?'"
Friend: "Are you laughing on me?"
Me: (slightly more amused) "No no. It's just..."
Friend: "Ok. What happened to your laptop?"
Me: "Erm. Well I broke it. I dropped it on the floor and smashed it."

I said the word "smashed" in much the same way that my nephew, fine young chap that he is, used to say it when he was about two years old - with fairly exaggerated mouth movements - starting with an attacking "sma" sound and drawing out to a crescendo an unvoiced hissing "s" followed by almost barely perceptible "d". If you are having trouble imagining the sound of this, go find any two year old and have them say it for you.

My friend was hooked on this, until then rarely used but rather fantastic sounding word with many descriptive verbalisations - and he did quite some experimentation with it.

Smash
SMash
smAsh
smaaaaaaSH
SMASH
smash

In the maturity of my language I'd forgotten how many brilliant ways there was so say the word "smash". In fact, for the next few weeks we two thirty-somethings regressed into our own smashing world amusing ourselves with the discovery (or re-discovery) of this word.

Try it. Say the word to yourself a few times. If you avoid taking yourself too seriously for a few minutes you'll find yourself quite fascinated.

Well - the screen on my laptop is still broken - but the annoyance is quickly forgotten when I receive a random text message or a phone call consisting only of some hitherto unused variant of "smash". It's fantastic hearing someone learn English. It also gives a second chance to see some of the things that grabbed our attention or enlightened us as kids. (I'm sure that my Lebanese friends are having an equally entertaining time listening to my own juvenile Arabic but that's another story).

There's more to Smash! like US$1200 for a new LCD and an Arabic language revelation - but that will have to wait for next time.