Project Wonderful Banner

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Those damned odes

What's Mallard raving about today?

Fruitcakes.

Sweet Lord, this is going to be a painful week. I mean, I always thought I'd be happy if Mallard went totally bat-shit insane...

Of course we could read this as being an admission that prejudice against homosexuals is one of the last bastions of socially-acceptable prejudice. That's fairly unlikely, but I imagine the rest of the week will be less painful if we all just mentally substitute the metaphoric meaning of fruitcake for the literal meaning whenever Mallard uses it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is one of my major peeves. Fruitcake is a term that is (or at least originally was) meant to disparage the mentally ill ("nuts")and is part of a longer phrase "nutty as a fruitcake".

Ignorant bigots apparently thought that "fruitcake" was a synonym for "fruit". (I first became aware of this usage when John Rocker ranted about New York subways a few years back). Yes, Tinsley is precisely the kind of idiot who's too dumb to keep his insults straight. Unfortunately, there are enough ignorant bigots out there using fruitcake as a slur for homosexuals now, that this may be a valid secondary definition.

This upsets me, because I used to like using the word fruitcake to describe people like Tinsley, but I don't feel like I can use it anymore lest people think I'm anti-gay, rather than anti-crazy