omgwtf!

I’ve got a massive fucking brain hemmorhage amount of work this weekend.

Interviewers are a bunch of fucking morons who think they’re the smartest people in the history of the universe. They’re not. They’re stupid assholes who can barely form a question without stammering their way through even the most simple of queries. It takes these people 30 minutes to ask someone to please state and spell their name. Interviewers are right up there on my list of useless human beings. They’re almost as bad as tech support reps. *sigh*

Onward!

So, I saw a documentary recently about the Sahara.

The Sahara.

Now, go back and read those last two sentences again. If you are especially clever, you would notice that I did not add the word “desert” after “Sahara.” There is a reason for this, and the reason is that Sahara fucking means desert in the Arabic language. So to say “Sahara desert” means that you are saying “I am a stupid motherfucking idiot who doesn’t know a goddamn thing” when really youre probably trying to come across as knowledgable about something. This obviously negates your effort, and consequently, it displays your ignorance in bright neon to the people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Now, since I was about six years old, I have known that Sahara means desert, and that if you didnt want to sound like an asshole, you wouldnt go around saying “Sahara desert” with wild abandon. I know this because my mother explained it to me. So I never learned this shit in school. In fact, all my teachers said “Sahara desert” in every school I ever went to, despite the fact that I would correct them…every single time. Not one of them accepted the correction, right up until high school, where, to my astonishment, my first year history teacher not only knew that Sahara meant desert, but she routinely corrected any student who used the phrase “Sahara desert.” They ridiculed her when she did it. Yeah. Cool, huh?

Anyway, in this documentary they talk to a rather conversant woman who knows lots of things about the Sahara and the civilizations therein. She’s told all kinds of stories, including the terribly sad tale of the sacking and the subsequent fall of Timbuktu (fucking gold-digging Moroccan bastards!), and she’s obviously quite intelligent and most definitely extremely knowledgeable about this area of the world and the history that comes from there.

She keeps saying Sahara desert.

I have to tell you, it makes her look pretty damn ridiculous. I mean, really. I can see if she was an archaeologist who worked maybe in the Antarctic (world’s largest desert, so the comparison is legitimate! Damn you!) and doesn’t know from the Sahara or what it means. But this stuff is right out there on teh intarweb for anyone to find. How can you be a scholar whose specialty is the Sahara and the peoples and civilizations that sprang up in the area throughout history, and still go around saying Sahara desert? What the hell?

Maybe it’s just that nitpicky pain in the ass in me that gets crazy and makes people hate to go to the movies with me, but if I were her student in a classroom, I’d find it impossible to keep from correcting her. Every time she says it, I find my estimation of her dropping. It’s just an inexcusable fault to me, if you’re someone whose very life is dedicated to the study of a certain thing, to not even be able to correctly say the name of your own speciality. Saying Sahara desert is just plain wrong. The word doesnt mean some euphamistic description of a desert; it literally means desert. That’s just what Sahara means. It also means ocean, but I think it’s safe to say here that nobody in their right mind would confuse the two when they’re talking about THE Sahara. You know? Even eight, 10,000 years ago, when the Sahara had permanent lakes, there is no way it could ever have been confused with an ocean. So it seems clear that those folks who saw it first and were all like “Sahara! Sahara!” (loosely translated to “holy shit that’s a lot of fucking sand”) weren’t referring to an ocean. It’s very difficult to confuse the two, although I feel certain that pretty much any member of the Bush administration could probably do it easily.

How can you be a professor of Saharan studies and say Sahara desert with a straight face? I just drove me crazy.

Maybe I should take a break.

Man.