Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Thursday, March 13, 2003

Apparently, people have been struggling to make my link to Selfawaria in my early investigation of goths work. Normally I would just fix the link, but in this case the situation has been further beautified enough to justify a shiny new post.

The original link was to here, in which a big ol' goth spoke loathing of "pikeys", apparently unaware of the term's use as a racial insult against gypsies, and using instead the broader definition of poor people who do not dress or speak proper like what I do. At the time, it seemed somewhat ironic that somebody who probably finds himself on the receiving end of a fair amount of opprobrium from those less enlightened for his style of dress and behaviour should so unselfconsciously pass that loathing on to another undifferentiated mass. There's a line of Larkin related to that, but I can't for the life of me think what it is.

However, it got better subsequently, when aforementioned big ol' goth then asked if anyone had a copy of Fruity Loops he could copy for free. Because when "pikeys"take things without paying for them it is doubtless theft, but when members of the middle class do the same it is, apparently, NOT theft. Capitals, in case you needed to ask, not my own.

No wonder the launch of the Sinclair Giftie never really got off the ground around here...

On the bright side, without the discussion of this peculiarity, I might never have discovered my current favourite items of subcultural terminology, they being ostrogoth (an ostracised goth, that is one who spends a lot of time indoors) and visigoth (a visible goth, one frequently seen out and about, the goth equivalent of an ace face, perhaps). So it all ends happily after all.

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