Purism and the Public III

The Resurrection of a Purist..


"He was trying to inspire me to react."
"Incite, you mean?", said I, exasperated at such abuse of the language.
"Thank you. As ever, the leader of the Puritan clan."
The smug expression on his face when said that made my head go steaming like a rice-cooker about to blow up any instant.
"For god's sake, I'm a purist, not a puritan, and most definitely NOT their leader!", I bellowed.
"Hey, you were the one who insisted on being called a puritan", he responded with his hands up in the air, as though at gun point.
I sighed. I had insisted on being called that. Something I'm going to regret for the rest of my life.

"You could call me a purist", I used to say," but I prefer puritan. The word has a nice tinge to it, if you know what I mean."
It is exactly this love for the tinges that makes me what I am today - a colossal ass. Still, maybe I might have managed to slip out of all the mess had I shown a little tact. But when one goes around bursting with arrogance and confidence about everything one says, there isn't really any room to doubt one's own choice of words, let alone for tact to rectify an error. And, thus, I went around bursting with arrogance and confidence, claiming that I'm a, well what is said before. You feel rather superior and pompous at such times, particularly when people display a lack of comprehension at your remarks.
So, if ever by sheer bad luck - assuming that the arrogance and confidence is justified, in that you really has some knowledge about the language - your choice of words is found to be lacking the usual spark, it is, almost everytime, the end of a career in Insultation, Mockery & Sarcasm . Of course, in defence you would like to say that you were not in the best of shapes on that particular occasion - probably a bad cold or something - but the world is full of unforgiving hard-boiled eggs who will pounce on you at the slightest provocation, and thence onward vigorously undergo the routine of pouncing on you every time you cross them on the street. Rising back to the old form from this lowly point of disrepute, is a herculean task. However if you show discretion and exercise complete care and caution in your method, all may not be lost. Hope might still exist. you need to become the master of your fate and the captain of your soul and steer your ship out of that restless storm of disrepute and disdain.
An attribute that you shall need to possess if you are to achieve this, is absolute shamelessness coupled with strong disregard for everybody around. Because I tell you, the stigma is never washed away. No, it lurks on and it captures the minds of all those hard-boiled eggs who have ever faced the razor of your criticism. So every now and then one these hard-boiled eggs will pounce on you, menace in his eyes, malice on his mind. If on such an occasion you do not have the necessary credentials on your C.V you are bound to falter. You will be left wounded and hurt and slip back into that storm again. But if on the other hand, all is well, and you are, in fact, shameless and arrogant you shall be able to look a hard-boiled egg of any description - large and extra large are the usual sorts - in the eye and make him wilt like an aspen leaf. Thus, if you carry out this practice day-in and day-out, you are bound to go from height to height everyday and overcome all those any scyllas and charybdises that try to get in your way and dock your ship into the Ports of Glory eventually. And thus, you shall be back into the business of Insultation, Mockery & Sarcasm in mid-summer form.