A million questions

How are you going to use the word web 2.0?

These are weird times. I want to buy a platypus to feel old-fashioned. Yeah, that extinct animal which looks like a cross between an ordinary duck and a meerkat. My friend Daboo, who has seen the world in Europe, tells me ebay is a great place to source extinct animals. He told me he bought a white elephant on ebay and rides the big fella in Thailand. He calls the jumbo ‘Kid 2.0’. He goes to Bangkok whenever he misses foot massages, monasteries and funny English accents – where ‘la’ sounds like ‘na’. It isn’t hard to find young Thai girls telling dollar-carrying tourists how much they ‘nove’ them. By the way, Daboo is a huge old friend of mine. When I saw him this time I could see he had upgraded himself even more by downing beers and meat. He is now Daboo 2.0.

These are weird times. After all, how many words do you have in the English language that has a whole number in it. The millionth word - Web 2.0 - is here in this complicated world. Soon, people are going to flip to the ‘w’ section in dictionaries to find out what web 2.0 means. ‘W’ was, till now, a less often turned to section. Very few people use words like ‘wamble’ and ‘wank’. But ‘web 2.0’ is, apparently, used every 15 minutes now, especially by web junkies who have a fondness for Facebook quizzes, some of which seek to answer stupid questions like ‘what drug are you?’. The answer to that is simple: if you are an addictive personality, it depends on the accessibility of the drug. A miserable, unemployed under-matriculate would not write to Carlos Castenada or Aldous Huxley, asking them for peyote or mescaline. In truth, the most addictive substances are money, power and women. Ask Berlusconi and the Czech president, who claimed his nude photo (we didn’t carry the pic because the ‘G’ force was too high, and by ‘G’ I mean ‘gross’) had been enhanced. But he didn’t specify who had enhanced it: tabloid photographers or his East European testosterone.

Anyway, getting back to the millionth English word, web 2.0, I wonder how would people misspell it. The hallmark of a good word lies in the kind of bloopers it can produce. For instance, there are copy editors who dread words like ‘public’ and ‘message’ because they easily become ‘pubic’ and ‘massage’. Would web 2.0 be misspelt as wob 2.1 or wed 0.2, or, in the worst case scenario, would it be web 2.01010101? Come to think of it, can this word even accommodate errors?

I wonder how lovers would use it. Possibly like this: ‘When I first met you dear, you looked like your web 2.0 version. What happened now?’. Realistic fellows like me would say, "My love for you was web 0.0 in the beginning, now it is 1.0 and if you don’t nag it might reach 2.0 or at least 1.95, if not anything else’. Would it be used thus: ‘She left me because she didn’t see any web 2.0 in the relationship. I agree, there was no future for us’. Or, is this a possible usage: ‘Now she is fat and ugly, but she will soon achieve her web 2.0ness because she is jogging and eating slow food’. (Slow food’ is another new word. It’s the opposite of McDonald’s... I mean fast food).

How would web 2.0 be used in the plural or in the continuous tense? Would it be ‘web 2.0s’ or would it simply be ‘web 2.0’, like ‘police’? Could it be: ‘She has vision. Since an early age she has been webbing 2.0’. How would it be as an adjective? ‘She is a web 2.0 cheater’. I hate to think how ‘web 2.0’ would sound as a verb. Would we say: ‘She webbed 2.0 to upgrade her character’. Or: ‘He web 2.0ed in on her because she would soon exist’.

I think ‘cuddies’ should have been the millionth word. Why? Because it has a good foundation. Two good foundations actually, especially in heavy-bottomed areas like Africa and southern India.

Sales carnama

I test drove many cars recently. The salesman in the backseat tried to sell me the car in various ways. The Ritz rambler said the car was made for traffic congestion, the i20 guy said Korean kappa was refreshing, the Fabia fellow said it was close to Laura, the Linea lad said I was driving style itself, the Honda Jazz Jack said the car had so much space I could ferry my great Dane comfortably. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was looking for an extinct platypus on ebay, and that it would fit in the glove compartment. The Indica guy said, "Be Indian buy Tata". The Mercedes/ BMW butlers didn’t say anything, while the GM monk wanted to borrow some money.