The Lexicon of UnLove

So I got this email last night, right?

"Fake Rolexes! Make you real, and affordable!" No, not that one.

"Male pattern baldness leaving you left out, an alien? Try Chia Hair circles!" No, just past that.

"Hi" Yeah, that one. Somebody had some real questions. Oh sure, it started with the traditional, "Hi Rob" and meandered through the valley of "how are you, I am fine," but it finally did move on to the Rob moving on question. "What are you going to do to celebrate the divorce?"

Celebrate? Divorce? Well, I hadn't really thought about celebrating my divorce. It just didn't seem like a celebratory event. I suppose I could get a piñata and buy some darts. The neighbors kids are still twitching from the last time I tried that.

"I'm going to Disneyland!"

No. That's not quite right either. Oh, I'll be glad when the divorce is over, but is it really a cause for celebration? I mean the marriage is over. The marriage was the part worth the cake and the rice and the bad 80's tunes.

"Always and forever…"

Yeah, kiss my ass, Heatwave.

The marriage was over a long time ago. Next week, the state of California will recognize it's demise with an event they call "Divorce." Our state is slow that way. Gas is nearly five bucks a gallon, and we've still got people still driving SUVs like they're water powered youth generators.

It's all about image out here. You can tell a Californian from the color of tooth in his ear. It's blue, and it's sending brainwaves to the cell phone he can no longer carry while he's crushing traffic, working the crossword, and scarfing a tofu Twinkie.

Yup, we're a bluetooth state. And we look cool doing it. It's our state motto: "Y Pluribus Beauteous--Nike." The street translation is, "So long as you look good. Just do it." We don't care what it really means.

It does mean that I'll be looking good for my divorce--or at least as good as I did before the divorce. Nothing really changes. Does it really end when the state acknowledges the divorce? Is there a magic cut off and a red ribbon drawn across the date? A Rob runs through it, and the last year and a half disappear from my psyche?

Sign me up for that!

All this divorce-think makes me seek web babble. When things get heavy, I like to see what's stuck under the internet desk. Last night I saw a site that said "Divorce is not a verb."

Wha?

Divorce not a verb? Really? Yeah, that's what the blogger said. She screamed it so loud, it was a boldface post title: 14 pt. font of fury! Considering I'd written a 12 point post a few months ago accusing divorce of being a verb, I thought I should read why this woman pointed her infidelity finger at the lexicon of UnLove.

According to her, it was a perversion of modern society. Sometime after the hippies had slathered their bodies in the Woodstock mud, they started mucking about with the English language. That's right, the summer of love left us with the rude awakening dawn of Muggles, Truthiness, and a terrible hairy fuzz in our mouths.

"Who is that muggle lying in my bed..?"

Lady Blogger further claimed that the action of society opening it's arms to willy-nilly divorce created a verb.

Really? I've been trying to create a verb for a long time, eye of toad…hair of newt…no verbin' luck. All the verbiage in the world won't buy Rob a verb. Bloganista says it's my fault. She says all I need is to slip society a roofie and then seduce it into thinking my way. She says that's how elections are won.

Huh. That never worked with MyUnwife, how could I succeed with a whole culture? It's not like I'm George Clooney charming. I'm sort of like Vern Troyer after you drink a six pack. I am not in danger of adding anything to our culture.

If she was wrong there, I felt her whole premise was wrong. I felt I had to blame somebody beyond my parents for making divorce a verb. So I did what I always do when I'm torn between a crisis of language and an afternoon of work. I researched divorce.

According to the almighty Oz of internet (Google) the word divorce is a verb. It's also a noun. Of course the internet came after the hippies, (Al Gore says he invented it, Al's an honorary hippie scapegoat.) but some of it's resources are older than dirt, so I dug for hope.

I found a site offering Webster's 1913 definition. It seems Webster's copyright died. So did his cat. Now everybody can post it. Go look, his cat's out there, right next to Pavlov's dog. There's slobber all over the stupid thing. It's gross.

Webster's dictionary said that in 1913 divorce was both a verb, and a noun. I think we can stop blaming the hippies.

I even found a site that listed Webster's 1828 version of divorce. Yup. Still a verb. I know a lot of disappointed people: they can't even blame Nixon for this one. Andrew Jackson was around; he's also a favorite blame whipping boy. Point to him. Before you do though, you should continue reading. It gets older.

Webster gives a quote in his definition to show usage.

"Nothing but death Shall e'er divorce my dignities." -William Shakespeare.

The quote's from King Henry VIII. Another of histories blame boys--especially if you're anti Boleyn-icide. It's interesting, because Henry apparently didn't believe in divorce as a part of speech at all, noun or verb. "Beheading" on the other hand was practically a cliché.

Shakespeare was a believer though. Blame him. He used the "D" word. (Not "Death," he used that one a lot too, but "divorce" verb is the dead horse we're beating today.) He was definitely familiar.

Beyond that, Google gets a little blurrier. Even Wikipedia doesn't seem to acknowledge the existence of a union prior to that. There is an Egyptian hieroglyph I found. It's interpreted as verb-divorce. It's a black haired golden guy getting molested by a cat while a woman carts off half his pyramid. You can see Osiris laughing in the corner. Still, the glyph is open to interpretation. It could mean anything…

"Would you like to Super Size that?"

The important thing is that the blogger who blamed hippies for verb-divorce is wrong, and I'm right. I get the spoils, and I blame her. Because the one thing I've learned through all of this: so long as there's somebody to blame, there'll always be divorce, and it will always be an action verb.