Mania by Lionel Shriver

Author:Lionel Shriver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 2

At $569 a pop—there was money in reeducation—the six-week class in Cerebral Acceptance and Semantic Sensitivity that social services forced me to take was certainly edifying. True, we began with elementary no-no’s like “not the full deck,” “D-word as a sack of hammers,” or “two sandwiches short of a picnic,” whose insulting lightheartedness belied the lasting injury their casual deployment would occasion. As I didn’t need to be told that you weren’t supposed to call people stupid anymore, I figured I could get through this indoctrination in the same way I’d survived public school: with a book in my lap.

Yet we moved rapidly on to less obvious prohibitions. “Dumb” was out even as a synonym for mute. Forget being “dumbstruck”; our earnest young instructor, a skinny, fragile character named Timmy Muswell, commended the lackluster substitute “surprised.” A “dumbwaiter” could seem to allude to a “dumb waiter” and cause gross offense in the hospitality industry. Since an appealing alternative to zoning out with my heavily thumbed Evelyn Waugh novels was playing the innocent pain in the neck, I raised my hand.

“Excuse me, but if our older house happens to have one, what are we supposed to call a D-word-waiter, then?”

“You could call it . . .”—Timmy punched at his phone—“a small elevator used for conveying food and dishes or small goods from one story of a building to another.”

“In that case,” I said, “it might be more efficient to have the mechanism taken out.”

The class tittered. The instructor was not amused. He was never amused.

We had also to protect the feelings of the inanimate. Thus automotive safety could no longer rely on “crash-test dummies” (Spotify had long before expunged the eponymous band); a fiberglass clothing model was respectfully dubbed a “mannequin.” “Dumbbells” were “weights.” Although by now we’d all gotten the message that calling someone “thick” was hate speech, we might be underaware that a piece of wood could no longer be thick, either; at a lumberyard, we should ask for a board “two inches fat.”

As a person could not be “dense,” neither could text or fog. As a person could not be “simple,” neither could an arithmetic problem; we should prefer “easy,” which I was obliged to observe did not mean the same thing—but Timmy moved rapidly on, because any reference to degrees of mental difficulty made him anxious. “Deep” could unfairly distinguish the profound, so the “deep end” of a swimming pool might more cautiously be identified as “the part with a lot more water in it.” “Slow” was loaded; best describe an application process, say, as “gradual” or “drawn out,” while a car up ahead keeping your progress to a crawl was “proceeding at a reduced speed.” A waltz was not “slow” but “sluggish,” a word that hardly made me want to hit the dance floor. Rather than risk bruising egos with “backward,” it was prudent to walk “in reverse.” Needless to say, heroin users were no longer “dope fiends,” although if you were an opioid addict, surely having your perspicacity traduced was the least of your problems.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.