“Real” is not an adverb. It is an adjective. If you remember back to your school days (and I know it’s tough with all the bong residue clouding your memory) an adjective modifies a noun, while an adverb modifies an adjective, or another adverb. So, for example, the following is grammatically correct:

That guy is a real asshole.

This is not grammatically correct:

My asshole is real itchy.

But in common parlance, many English speakers, even yours truly at times, use “real” as an adverb instead of the proper word, “really”. We say it’s “real cold” or “real cloudy”. We might describe someone as “real slutty” or “real violent”. On Fridays, we might get “real drunk”.

Language evolves, so there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with doing this. Personally, I find “really” has a better rhythm to it. But the main reason I hate “real” as an adverb is simply because I can’t ignore the mistake. When I hear someone say it’s “real cold”, even if I restrain myself from correcting them, or butchering them with a hatchet, which is what I normally would do, I still go through the mental motion of the correction in my head, “it’s REALLY cold, you fucking retard” (chop chop choppity chop).

Worse still is when I say it, and then have to correct myself. Like when I tell a girl my cock is “real fat” and then her mother maces me “real good”. (I cannot explain why this keeps happening. But then, midwifery is the career I chose.)

It’s sad that it would actually be easier for me to get a lobotomy than to expect the world to speak proper.

I mean, properly. (DAMMIT!)

“Irony” has been a word I hated for a long time, but it’s almost TOO BIG now to blog about. The problems with this word are almost too egregious and too numerous to do justice to it. Nonetheless, it screams out for an entry here, if only to put me on record as anti-irony.

Certainly, we are all aware, even those among us us who still call things “ironic”, and those knuckle-dragging troglodytes who think they are using “irony” ironically, that this word has been abused and abused and abused like I abused my grandmother. (Relax, it was the 90′s…it’s what everybody did in the 90′s–abuse their grandparents. I know that doesn’t make it right but it FELT right.) It isn’t even worth explaining the definition of the word here because it is clear that this word is nearly devoid of meaning–when people can use it to simply describe something bad, or merely interesting, that happened. Perhaps it needs to be totally stricken from our lexicon. There is no use trying to fix a word that is totaled.

So my question then becomes, what do we need to do to remove a word from public usage? We can stop using it ourselves, of course, and encourage others to do the same. And when someone around us, say an acquaintance or close relative uses this word, we can ignore them, or hit them, or stab them in the penis or vagina with a piece of glass. If they are a talking dog, we can stab them in the dog penis or dog vagina. Parrots should be thrown into the sea and chimpanzees who can sign “irony” should be fired out of a cannon, also into the sea, but a different sea from the parrots because we wouldn’t want them procreating and creating an underwater master race of parronkeymen and parronkeymaids who take over the world and put us in cages. Because that would be ironic!

I am a clean guy. I like my room to be tidy, my hallway to be swept, and my kitchen to be insect-free. But there are those that would accuse me of “being OCD”. This acronym, which once stood for “obsessive-compulsive disorder”, is now a simple stand-in for cleanliness, perpetrated by the denizens of filth, sloth, and ignorance.

As humans, we are surrounded by obsessions and by compulsions. We are compelled to eat. Some of us are a little obsessed with vaginas, others with penises, a rare few with little boys. Some people are obsessed with heroin, and compulsively inject it into their veins. And minor obsessions with specific numbers, or even/odd numbers are very common. But you wouldn’t call any of these people “OCD”. They’re just people!

OCD is, as a matter of fact, a medically diagnosable anxiety disorder in which a person, overcome by anxiety and thoughts, compulsively behaves in a way that is disruptive to his life or the lives of others. Jack Nicholson in “As Good As It Gets” was a fine demonstration of OCD. Obsessions with numbers and germs, hoarding, checking and rechecking things, repeated hand-washing, can be OCD behaviors. Even obsessions with specific thoughts, which disrupt easy functioning, might be diagnosed as OCD.

But sweeping your floors now and then, wiping up after you’ve been cooking, putting away your dishes and organizing your books are NOT demonstrations of obsessive-compulsive disorder unless they interfere with, that is, DISORDER, one’s life.

Thank you. Please leave me alone now forever.