By the dummies, for dummies

If a dummy meet a dummy coming through the rye, are they both stupider because of it?

One had to wonder this week after Wiley’s, a publishing company presumably named after the coyote of Loony Tunes fame, tried to lean on this newspaper for publishing a headline of mine that read ‘Cricket for dummies”.

Wiley’s, you see, publishes the For Dummies series, which takes aspects of human knowledge and behaviour, guts them of nuance, erudition, beauty and craft, crams the desiccated corpse of what was once worth knowing into a comic-book format, and then hawks it to dolts. Hence For Dummies.

It’s a formula that works a treat when one wants to know how to raise happy iguanas or knock together passable toast racks, but one is left feeling somehow unfulfilled after its bullet-pointed explication of Byzantine liturgical singing or three peppy sentences outlining Vermeer’s brush technique.

Being a corporation, and thus predisposed to brain-dead money-grubbing, Wiley’s has sent a decree through all the lands that it owns the phrase ‘for dummies”. It qualifies this with a list of territories, but the message is clear: it’s theirs. Everywhere. Even in space. Times a gazillion and hope to die. Those Martians better not be trying to peddle Zil’waks Gör Na-Xi For Dummies or they’re going to get their little carbon-based butts sued back to the Stone Age, that’s for durn sure.

And so apparently there was a murmur of unease that spread through the marbled corridors of the New Jersey head office when my headline appeared like a barbarian in fuzzy booties shaking his club at the glittering spires of Rome. After all, Wiley’s can’t afford to have colonial upstarts mucking about with its copyrighted phrases, not when they’ve clearly got so much planned: titles like The Obliteration of Linguistic Freedom For Dummies, The Triumph of Greed over Common Sense For Dummies, and so on.

The logical conclusion of this retrospective, child-like piracy of language doesn’t bear thinking about. Picture the scene as a frazzled young father, clutching a puree-stained shopping list, reaches for his keys. ‘I’m just nipping out for dummies, for nappies —” At once the door is kicked in and Dad is dragged away to a Wiley’s ‘Re-education For Dummies” holding cell.

On the way he begins to weep and is slow to obey an order. His captors become enraged. ‘Just do it!” they bellow. Instantly they fall dead, picked off by a sniper in expensive sneakers. You don’t mess with Nike trademarks —

Certainly teachers must already be exchanging whispered passwords and hurrying through the sewers to secret safe houses where they can mark test papers free from prosecution by Nike for unlicensed use of that company’s famous ‘swoosh”. Incidentally, a swoosh is what normal people call a tick. Ticks are insects that grow fat on other people’s blood. They are difficult to kill, and are especially prevalent in urban environments like sweat-shops in Malaysia.

The organisers of the Pro20 cricket pantomime in this country presumably did their homework before settling on ‘Wicked Cricket” as their tagline. No doubt they are fairly sure that Wicked Cricket, an online purveyor of erotica and awfully written ‘adult” poetry, doesn’t have the wherewithal to sue. Still they would do well to give Ms Cricket a wide berth since she seems a fairly dab hand with a whip.

Zapper the cricket, though, is a different story. As far as I could tell he is able to shoot energy bolts out of either his feelers or his legs, and he is terribly athletic, which makes him a handful for his enemies, who seem to be luminous aphids. Pro20’s wards can only hope Zapper, billed as ‘the Wicked Cricket” by his parents at the Atari computer game stable, doesn’t take offence and shoot a copyright suit at them out of his feelers.

At Anfield you’ll never walk alone. That’s because you’ll have two Customs and Excise officers on either side of you, good-cop bad- copping you: ‘Mate, I know you didn’t mean any disrespect to Rogers and Hammerstein, they know it, and Lord knows you know it, but Barry here isn’t convinced. I’ve tried telling him—”

‘You lousy cheating stealing bastard! Singin’ the songs of my mates Richard and Oscar and not payin’ a penny for the honour! You make me sick! You make me want to puke!”

In the end all this is for dummies; for dummies like For Dummies like for dummies to be dumb. So if a dummy meet a dummy, they’re welcome to each other.