POST-NUTRITIVE DISPOSAL SUBSTANCE

of Male Bovines

Back to college, specifically Loyalist College of Applied Arts and Technology, Belleville, Ontario, where I overthrew myself. Creativity flourished, facilitated by nutek. This was the seedbed from which grew the glorious Imagine Nation of the Peoples Republic of Poetry. I took the Communications Arts course, which included TV production, photography, radio, script writing, and another course that was not part of Communications Arts: data processing.

All of that tek informed the poetry I began to compose, from statistical sonnets to other compositions. I became Langtek (language technician) and began to play with language, with occupational jargons: psychologese, sociologese, medicalese, computerese. They were functional languages of an occupational constituency. This sublanguage was antithetical to the poetic as I understood poetry at the time – lyrical, metered, sensual, emotional. The font that was used was OCR (Optical Character Recognition), meaning that the poetry was machine-readable.

Then there is adminstrationese, bureaucratese, (bureaucrap), militarese, politicalese, that affect society at large. This is the tongue of deceit, manipulation, and power. It’s a bloodless language that spills blood. George Orwell put it well, “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind … wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

During the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, a carload of agents parked themselves outside the building that housed Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office with the intention of entering it and gathering compromising information. When questioned by lawyers, group members said they were there to conduct a “preliminary feasibility and vulnerability study.” In streetspeek they were “casing the joint.”

Later in the 1970s, there was an RCMP scandal, in which officers told a Royal Commission of Inquiry that they had conducted a “surreptitious entry intelligence probe,” aka b&e snoopery.

So my compoetriots, that is the post-nutritive disposal substance of male bovines, aka BS.