Friday 19 October 2007

ROAD RAGE




I’ve only recently discovered that of all the banks of colourful vocabulary I use in different situations in everyday life, the smallest I’ve got seems to be that of colourful vocabulary I use while out driving. Although my choice of labels for fellow drivers, shouted out or hissed through clasped teeth, are not necessarily parental advisory category, they are rather un-pc. Furthermore, I seem to have quite a limited range, which consists of ‘idiot’, retard, and saved for the dumbest drivers out there, a-hole. Indeed, I do not pick these words at random, but with particular attention to the category of offence that would validate the un-pc labelling. Let’s just have a quick look at the list of insults with the respective offences that justify their use.

Idiot – possibly the mildest of insults on the list, idiot is generally the first step (whirl?) down the spiral of drawing CQ’s fury one’s way. Idiots can be classified as those who pull out in front of you without indicating, tailgate you when you’re going at a reasonable speed on the motorway, suddenly slow down to make a right/left turn without having indicated at all. As can be seen, many in this category seem to be indicator-disabled wastes of space who should really go back to do their driving tests again.

Retard – The choicest form of ‘retard’ you can get from yours truly is the coined re-turd, a play on the word through the use of a former student’s favourite swear word for lower human forms: ‘turd’) Re-turd is save for those who clearly have chucked out the Highway Code and all the other rules of driving, behave similarly in many ways to ‘idiots’ but with more disregard to other road users. For instance, a driver who pulls out in front of you without indicating and blissfully continues to go over the 30 miles speed limit in a built up area truly deserves the label of re-turd, a level of idiocy mixed with excrement.

A-hole – The last but not the least are the choicest drivers, who deserve to be labelled as an orifice of human anatomy where the aforementioned excrement is exerted from. A-holes are those who have total disregard not just for road rules, other users and laws, but also for the sanctity of human life. The sort of driver who not only pulls out in front of you without indicating, but does it right at the last minute barely missing scraping your body work, the driver who dives into the roundabout without checking first, the driver who storms through a one way road without considering right of way clearly belongs into this category. Having, as the Turkish saying goes, ‘got their license from a butcher’s shop’, these should be banned from driving. For life...
Right, I’ll hit the road now...