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Talk Like a Samurai Day
On:2009-04-22 06:04:44
Our story opens to the sounds of macho Nihongo stuff: [sucking sound]; Katana; Wakizashi; Bokken etc. [a deep hoarse O-o-o-o] "Sumimasen, Kojiro san: kaisuiyoku ni ikimasen ka?1" as Miyamoto Musashi once said to Sasaki Kojiro on Ganryûjima . Oh sorry, sorry I'm sure you don't have the faintest idea what that's all about, and that's simply because you probably don’t realise this is the famous, or at least infamous Talk Like a Samurai Day---I mean I suppose you wouldn’t really since I’ve only just invented it.
You see it all started back in September of last year when I had the misfortune to discover that it was Talk Like a Pirate Day and I (as a typical switched-on twenty-first century sort of guy) just had to check out their web site , whereon, I discovered to my even greater misfortune, there is the rather distressing sight of a couple of poofy-looking pseudo-pirates apparently attempting, with pathetic insensitivity, to be piratical without making the slightest effort to get even a bit dirty2, "Pshaw!" I thought: and then, further, faced with the realisation that there are only so many times you can say "Oh! Ar! Me hearties!" or "Avast! Ye lubbers!" or the ever popular "Yo! Ho! Ho!" during even a long and rather boring and uneventful day without raising the boringness and uneventfulness quotients of that day well above human understanding let alone human tolerance, I decided that something ought to be Done.
And of course that I'm just the man to Do it.
So I purposed to find means to eradicate this effete and overly hygienic perversion.
But what to do?
So, of course being me, I experimented, in true and tried Scientific Method. Initially, as an extremely simplified first approximation to my goal, I set up a double blind test of a relatively small-sampled Talk Like a RADA-Trained British Actor While He's Performing the Part of a Royal Air Force Officer in an English WWII Tear Jerker Day, or rather since this would indeed have to be a terribly sad and tragic movie from WWII England we were dealing with, it would, in effect, be Talk Like a RADA-Trained British Actor While He's Performing the Part of a Royal Air Force Officer in an Upper Lip Trembler Day. This ran into problems right from the start, since the results were so restrained, so British, and so clipped that no one, including the researchers, actually realised that the test was:
A) starting, B) proceeding or C) over.
And then again there were the same problems as found with the pirates: that there are only so many times that one can say things like "Oh Sybil the bally Huns shot my leg off again and I've pranged my bloody Spitfire" in the course of a day without having people wanting to actually shoot your legs off and really prang your bloody Spitfire.
So then I decided to take the bull by the horns (and as I utter that expression I wonder if I've not been in Texas too long---anyway) and I would try double, double double-blind tests simultaneously, at the same location and using the same team, working on Talk Like a Politician Day, Talk Like a Criminal Day and Talk Like a Complete Blithering Idiot Day: here the problem being that there was so much overlap between them that no one could tell who was in which group, what they should be talking like, nor why, so it quickly degenerated into a combined Talk Like Someone Who is Giving or Receiving a Punch in the Nose Day!
Then I had my Eύρηκα! moment, and avoiding with considerable dexterity all that embarrassment with the bath and the running in the street and the forgetting of the towel, Talk Like a Samurai Day leapt fully armed into the world and now real men can have a real alternative to that whimpy Pirataphone foolishness---real women can too, and even real children...
Ja mata raishu for now from Richard Howland-Bolton deshita! [fade out:Katana; Wakizashi; Bokken; a deep hoarse O-o-o-o!]
Notes:
1 Excuse me Mr Kojiro: Do you care to go to the beach with me?*
2 nor even, so far as I could tell, to remove any superfluous limbs.
