{"id":1863,"date":"2010-11-13T00:14:14","date_gmt":"2010-11-13T00:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/?p=1863"},"modified":"2010-11-13T19:01:24","modified_gmt":"2010-11-13T19:01:24","slug":"of-letter-bombs-and-skull-tweets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/2010\/11\/of-letter-bombs-and-skull-tweets\/","title":{"rendered":"Of letter bombs and skull tweets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sticks and stones can break our bones, but words will never hurt us? Bah<\/strong>. Every playground-dwelling kid in the world has shown that phrase the lie. In fact, it amazes me that we aren\u2019t more wary of the idiomatic anthrax that wages alchemical warfare inside us every day.<\/p>\n

As any self-help guru worth his weight in jacuzzis will tell you, the words we think and speak determine our moods, our perceptions and ultimately our lives<\/strong>. Tony Robbins \u2013 he of the iconic nineties whoop-yeah Bible \u2018Awaken the Giant Within<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 may be relentlessly American, embarrassingly self-promoting and an outrageous coiner of Copyrighted Jargonese\u2122, but he\u2019s pretty damn good on what he calls Transformational Vocabulary (\u2122, natch).<\/p>\n

The idea is that we\u2019re all infested with thousands of tiny linguistic burrs which lodge in our psychological schemas<\/a> and profoundly colour our view of the world \u2013 often in shades of sludgy, depressive grey. The habitual words and metaphors we use to describe our selves, experiences and emotions inevitably limit and ultimately shape those selves, experiences and emotions. If you\u2019re feeling \u2018over-burdened\u2019 as you \u2018plough away\u2019 at work before you \u2018get slaughtered\u2019 at weekends, no wonder that your day has a submissively miserable farmyard pall.<\/p>\n

\"\"It was Rory Kinnear who reminded me of transformational language this week. No, sadly not over a chummy brandy and ginger backstage at the National; I simply saw his Hamlet<\/a>, which is a masterclass in performative vocabulary. Every word is obsessively, precisely coined: immaculately chosen, bitterly revelled in, each speech visibly poisoning his skittish, scatting body syllable by syllable.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Will according to Wordle: Hamlet demonstrates the art of the mindfuck soliloquy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For Hamlet is the master of self-torture through articulacy, the prince of destructive NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming)<\/a>. He talks himself into tragedy. The sheer inventiveness and sensual impact of his rhetoric makes his nightmare state of Denmark so real that it transubstantiates from word to matter. His metaphors of death, decay and danger are so relentless that they actually materialise.<\/p>\n

His father becomes a pristine, revenging ghost. His uncle becomes a serpentine usurper. His lover becomes a maniac, his mother a whore and O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I. His world is one of mist and madness, hellfire and icy doubt, whatever the truth. This is Hamlet\u2019s play, and he\u2019s writing the script, and he\u2019ll enjoy every damn line of it, even if it is written in poison ink.<\/p>\n

O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
\nSeem to me all the uses of this world!
\nFie on\u2019t, ah fie, \u2019tis an unweeded garden
\nThat grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
\nPossess it merely<\/em><\/p>\n

Just listen to it. Who could resist sinking into that vowel-seeping bog?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth thinking about; I\u2019ve been catching my own descriptive cankers, and holding them up to the light. They\u2019re noticeably, bizarrely martial; just look at this post.<\/p>\n

Hmmm. I\u2019m not sure I want to be Fortinbras.<\/p>\n

Molly Flatt<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sticks and stones can break our bones, but words will never hurt us? Bah. Every playground-dwelling kid in the world has shown that phrase the lie. In fact, it amazes me that we aren\u2019t more wary of the idiomatic anthrax that wages alchemical warfare inside us every day. As any self-help guru worth his weight … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137,371],"tags":[833,828,831,832,830,829],"class_list":["post-1863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-posts","category-mollyflatt","tag-determination","tag-hamlet","tag-lives","tag-moods","tag-perceptions","tag-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1863"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1874,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863\/revisions\/1874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}