LooseTalk: Editing the queen’s lingo

In music it’s called sampling. This is the act of taking a portion or sample of a song and reusing it as a sound recording in a different song. Like, you are up in the dance club when you realise that what the DJ is belting out sounds familiar? Perhaps it borrowed the catchy bass line and remade it into a new beat arrangement – just like Sean Kingston’s 2007 hit, Beautiful Girls which borrowed heavily from Stand by Me, the 1961 classic by Ben E. King. Music sampling is good in as far as it breathes new life into an otherwise old sound. But not all of us are musicians, so we can’t all go about sampling people’s songs. As a writer, I’m convinced that sampling is just as good for the writer as it is with musicians. Some times you don’t have what to write, a medical condition termed as “writers’ block”. That said, there are all these “wise” words and sayings and quotes and dictums and proverbs and one-liners that teachers and society have been ramming down our throats from when we first set foot in school, and that I feel need sampling to keep up with the evidently fast-changing times. In these new “Tweeting” and “Facebooking” times, meanings to some popular words and phrases need to be urgently upgraded. There is an old, tired and boring idiom in which it is claimed that “He who laughs last, laughs best/longest”. I’m told it actually has got nothing to do with the act of laughing. That if someone does bad things to you, that person may feel satisfaction, but you will feel even more satisfaction if you get your revenge on that person. But does he who laughs last actually laugh the longest? I don’t think so! I think that in the normal course of conversation, he who laughs last is the person that did not get the joke. He who laughs last therefore laughs because others are laughing. He who laughs last is either slow or dense. Have you ever suffered the urge to literally “kill two birds with one stone”? This idiom alludes to the action of solving two problems at one time with a single action. Not bad. But do you know what woes killing two birds with one stone will bring your way? If you visited the bird sanctuary in Bugesera and killed off two birds with one stone, I’m sure you would attract an arrest warrant from the birding authority or RDB. So, never kill more than one bird with a single stone. And if “two wrongs don’t make a right”, what then do they do? Well, they make a U-Turn. In the same vein, it’s indeed true that “birds of a feather flock together”. But do you want to know what birds of a feather that are flocking together do? Well, they either crap on your head, or your car!