Quantifying the incidence of gratuitous snarl and fear/pity language on Butterflies & Wheels
Dr. Franc Hoggle
Department of Gyno-Podiatry, Universidad El Toro Caca Grande
La Habana Vieja, Cuba 10100
-= ABSTRACT =-
Westernised professional wailing (唱板板, or “singing the banban”1) as a career and lifestyle choice is one of the most challenging, yet least known, branches of the classical performing arts. It distinguishes itself from its eastern roots – that of professional mourners hired for funerals as public showing of the social status of the deceased – by being far more entrepre’neurial and a business model in its own right. It is a complex, multidisciplinary form of expression that distills the finer subtleties from Munchausen Syndrome and certain aspects of HPD into its own unique brand psychodramatic theatre. Notable laureates of this school have been Glenn Beck, Anita Bryant, Joseph McCarthy, Jenny McCarthy (no relation), Catharine MacKinnon and Fred Phelps – those that have taken the mundane, the nonsensical and the nonexistant and, through applied hyperbole, hysteria and robotic repetition of fear-mongering and artificial “us and them” division, have escalated non-problems to the status of cancers that threaten to undermine society itself, thus ensnaring and captivating an audience of the feeble and the powerless that are incapable of articulating their bottled up angst unassisted. As with all styles of thespian expression, language is the primary tool and here the language of demonisation and persecution is the key to establishing a stage presence and an unforgettable persona in the eyes of the target audience. Yet this language is too seldom analysed, let alone quantified. This paper attempts to enumerate the frequency with which the language of demonisation and persecution occurs in one particular contemporary ideological ghetto – that of the collective that has formed around freefromthoughtblogs, Skepchick and it’s mutant offspring Atheism+.
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