Character Sketch: The Bombastion

Watched Charade, an old thriller-comedy-mystery from the 60s. It was pretty good, but Jinx and I have decided that the best "old movie" is the Manchurian Candidate.

I stuck up for someone the other day by pointing out that he's one of the few people I don't dislike. I don't like the elitist, egotistcal twang of that sentence, but the sentiment behind it was honest enough. I don't think that everyone else should consider it important, but that's a high compliment from an increasingly embittered and/or apathetic guy like myself.

We trashed a lot of people last night; Jonas fell asleep, but Rock Show Girl and I managed to find fault with almost everyone we could think of for an hour or two afterwards. It was some nice refreshingly antisocial bonding.

One person in particular, The Bombastion, needs to be destroyed. Well, not destroyed, just fixed. He reminds me, I'm sorry to say, of a younger version of myself, the 9th grader who took pleasure in speaking a convulted and artificial form of English full of "curses" and other pretentiously archaic constructions.

Remnants of that Bold Hero, as you might already have noticed, are still in existence. I occasionally say "good gads" and a few other words (like the wonderfully correct "dastard") have slyly become a part of my regular lexicon.

As J. Loss once observed, I should probably use words that don't make people judge me so quickly. But part of me can't help it, part of me still thinks it's funny, and a last little part doesn't really care what people think about my speech.

More realistically, archaic speech sets someone apart, it calls attention to itself, and it's the speakers responsibility to have good and interesting ideas behind their speech, if not a reason for using it to begin with.

The Bombastion uses big words and a permanent actor's voice to set off his speech, but there's usually nothing behind it. He's a rehasher, a repeater, an observer of the obvious, herald to the trivial detail. His eloquence, as they say, is all bombast.

Everything he says is difficult to listen to, because it sounds important and interesting but actually isn't. He's a boor, a tall tall talking characature with a questionable amount of personality behind his speech. It's infuriating and very sad. It makes my ears want to bleed, to see the English language mutilated so, and for so little.

It's like looking at a road I could've, still could take, and being able to see the horrible consequences. No thanks, I don't want to pop my head in doors and begin every sentence with an important-sounding hook and use words that are always bigger but rarely better than their synonyms. It makes me regret every catch-phrase I've ever said; it makes me want to shut up a lot more often.

If this annoys me so much, I should try to be the opposite. It would, at the very least, seem more natural. But that's The Bombastion, and that's his nutshell, and that's where he'll stay until I hear something worth hearing.