Has the word 'delinquent' fallen out of fashionable usage? If I were a cultural warrior, would I ascribe the absence of this word in reportage of juvenile justice issues to the blight of Political Correctness? Why has 'hooligan' retained a currency that 'delinquent' appears to have lost? Or am I just moving in the wrong circles?
I've been marking essays on Alan Sillitoe's 1959 short story, 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.' My political response mechanisms are somewhat alarmed by the frequent perjorative application of the term delinquent to the story's protagonist. The word-nerd lurking behind the red pen is, however, delighted.
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- trixie
- My birth certificate attests to my debut on a Saturday in the middle of May, 1977. You can thus deduce that I am a bullish Taurean, that I was born in the Chinese year of the Snake, that my Burmese animal is the Dragon. This means that I am wont to bellow, hiss, and breathe fire, to stampede, slither and fly. Because my birth certificate was stamped by a bureaucrat in service to Her Majesty’s Government, I am a citizen of the United Kingdom. Because both of my parents were practicing Australians, I am also a citizen of Australia. I have thus two passports both of which inexplicably contain photographs of some random grumpy refugee from an eighties hair band. This means that I am constitutionally duplicitous: I can change my mode from imperial to colonial at will; I can embody, at turns, Old World Charm and New World Pizzazz; I can personify the staid and stagnant as readily as the arriviste and anxious. I do not hold, nor have I ever held, a driver’s licence, a boat licence, a gun licence, a forklift ticket or a motorcycle licence. This means that I have never, ever had to moderate my alcohol consumption for fear that I might have to operate heavy or dangerous machinery.
3 comments:
Perhaps 'delinquent' comprises too many syllables for Peter Harvey? Or every time Deborah Knight pronounced the word, Ron Wilson creamed his jeans, until a mounting dry-cleaning bill forced a change in terminology?
I rue the seeming disfavour for the word 'dilettante', and my consequent loss of identity.
JJ, dilettantism is not dead. If so, I too must declare my Self slaughtered on the altar of obselescence. The delinquenti are dead; long live the dilettanti. x
Delinquent alas has become (in my experience) ascribed to those who fail to pay their loans on time. A depressing development really.
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