In 1911, Gustave Flaubert launched a valiant but vain broadside at the hypocrisy, doublespeak, platitudes and banality of the bourgeois chattering classes. Three years after the publication of A Dictionary of Received Ideas, World War I broke out. Four years after that, influenza devastated the planet. Then Hitler, Stalin and Henry Ford did the same.
Was Flaubert’s book responsible for 80-million deaths in the 20th century? Can a direct line be drawn between his satire and Brümilda van Rensburg? Probably not, but it’s a splendid way of introducing the subject at dinner parties.
Of course, the bourgeoisie no longer chatters. Instead it pulps oyster-catchers’ nests under its SUVs on pristine beaches, contributes to reconciliation by giving R2 to parking attendants and joins book clubs where it discusses the implications for religion and art history of The Da Vinci Code.
But most of all, it watches sport. Perhaps not actively — active engagement required intent, and the bourgeoisie has had purpose and focus bred out of it — but certainly sport is intricately bound up with everyday middle-class life: cricket practice, rugby club dinners, the highlights channel permanently on, hubby craning to see past his wife to see the replay as she broaches the subject of orgasms and how she hasn’t had one in nine years.
If French society of the early 1900s was fond of cliché and overly admiring of second-hand opinion, then ours is addicted to them. And sport is the great spittoon where all those intellectual and verbal dribbles end up, because sport and the world it creates are entirely unquestioning, and enormously impressed by pseudo-articulacy.
Hence it is time to present, in three parts over the next three weeks, a new dictionary of ideas. The idea was suggested to me by a poet with a genocidal glint in his eye, so if it results in another 100 years of global conflagration, call him rather than me, or else chalk it up to creative excess.
Bafana Bafana have world-class flair and vibrancy: That’s great, because they sure don’t have any ability. Unfortunately there isn’t a World Cup of sideways skipping, slapping knees and hopping over orange cones for us to win, so in the meantime one can only hope the South African Football Association will see the light and install Kaizer Chiefs as the national team.
Boxing is a sport: ‘Boxing is not a sport, it’s a business” (Rodney Berman, boxing promoter, Sunday Times, February 13). Which should make us look very carefully at other popular international sports, such as cultural imperialism, jihad and polo.
Catches win matches: They do, in rather the same way that respiratory failure and hypothermia killed the dinosaurs: it’s a splendid analysis if you want to overlook the huge flaming ball of intergalactic death hurtling in from space and the ensuing prototype nuclear winter. But then again, ‘Twenty wickets win matches” doesn’t rhyme, and contains a dizzying seven syllables rather than five. And remember, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. With bullets that people put in guns. Actually, in the final analysis, it’s human anatomy that kills people. Guns merely highlight certain weaknesses in the sternum and skull.
Channel of uncertainty: Generally used when a commentator isn’t clever enough to interpret a bowler’s tactics. Also used charitably to imply that the bowler in fact has a plan, and is not simply running in, his mind baked to steaming jelly by the Indian sun, with some half-formed notion of revenge sharing his consciousness with fantasies about pretty groupies breaking into spontaneous applause at the sight of his biceps.
Development: The process of encouraging children entirely uninterested in a particular sport to become interested in that sport. Development coaching involves dumping said children on some thorny veld with under- or oversized equipment and encouraging them until the sun goes down and they begin to cry. The National Sea-Rescue Institute is still looking for three development endurance swimmers who set off for Punta Arenas in 2003.
Football is a beautiful game: Of course it is, if you’ve grown up in a council flat overlooking wet concrete or on a landfill on which dogs battle naked urchins for grains of beef extract. Of course football is beautiful and noble and awe-inspiring to a species of which the average specimen prizes doilies, strip-malls, nylon shorts, porcelain harlequins with a single tear on each cheek, welded-chain letterboxes, Africa-shaped clocks and Angelina Jolie.
Next week: The international lie of prole genius and why it has kept us out of war