Non-Speakers
Last night, writing a comment to an earlier post, "Infusion," I hit upon a way to trim what would have been a wordy dependent clause: "... shortly after our first friendly loss to AIDS... " It was perhaps more poetic than intelligible, and I might just as easily have said "In 1985." But the purpose of the comment was to point to the fact that it's the "D" - for "deficiency" - that's the fatal ingredient in the acronym, not the "A" or the "I." I suffer from a complex of auto-immune diseases that trouble me because my immune system is overactive, not compromised. It's rather like James Dobson, going after SpongeBob SquarePants for lack of anything better to do.
I don't think that I would have used "friendly loss" in a post. It seemed permissible in a comment - a blog owner's comments, by their very nature, are informal precisely because they are not posts - but now I wonder. The tension in the phrase lies, of course, in the utter impossibility of there being anything friendly about someone's dying of AIDS, friend or not; therefore, the word "friendly" must mean something else, such as, in this case, "of a friend." But we're not living in the sixteenth century anymore; vocabulary is not so fluid, and my usage, as I knew it would be, is jarring.
That's my trouble. I like to jar. I pick my jarring moments with care, not because I want to stay out of trouble (ha!) but because I don't want there to be anything gratuitous about my transgressions. As I was writing, last night, I had a clear idea of the pinprick of offense that "friendly loss" was going to cause, and it was the very idea that this offense would register that spurred me on. I knew that a friend of mine would take issue with my language, and my response to the complaint in my inbox this morning echoed my sentiments last night: Bring it on!
Why this belligerence? Well, you should have seen the comment as initially previewed. Although I hadn't intended it to be provoking, I could see that it would have caused not pinpricks but gaping wounds. The rewrite was annoyingly tedious. When "friendly loss" was the only arguable bit left, I pretended that I could get away with aping Shakespeare and murmured "f*ck 'em." POST!
Sorry, chéri. Life is too short for Non-Speakers.
