THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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There’s nothing wrong with having a bonk between the sheets

There’s nothing wrong with having a bonk between the sheets

Re:  “Editor bonkers to allow so much bonking”, Have Your Say, July 31.

My goodness. The language police have raised their officious heads in this hallowed column. Paul sounds like an unusually stodgy English teacher. If so, I can probably outdo him in English-teacherliness, although hopefully not in stodginess, since I taught English, mostly in overseas American and international schools, for 31 years.  
Paul sniffs, “Such a letter [mine of July 17] would never be printed in a Western country.” Not wishing to shock you, Paul, but this happens to be Thailand – not a Western country. And who says that Western countries set the standard for the entire galaxy, eh? He berates me for not using “proper English throughout, using too much slang. Instead of saying that people engage in sexual intercourse, the letter-writer uses the language of the street to describe this act.”
I infer from this that Paul would have preferred that I write “our brave new world ... where women engage in sexual intercourse with women, men engage in sexual intercourse with men, and some engage in sexual intercourse with both”. Would that be boring or what? Readers would fall asleep before they got to the end of the sentence. Instead of using the lumbering Latinate phrase “engage in sexual intercourse [with],” I chose to use the more vigorous and concise word “bonk”.
My Concise Oxford Dictionary informs me that “bonk” is an informal British-English word that originated in the 1930s. It is not labelled  “offensive” or “vulgar slang”. I chose it carefully, avoiding the vulgar F-word and the less vigorous “screw”. “Bonk” is monosyllabic, colourful, onomatopoeic, and bouncy. It trips along merrily and imparts a sense of gaiety to the sexual act, instead of lugubriously wallowing in the Latinate verbosity of “engage in sexual intercourse [with]”.
“While it may be tolerable to use such language in an informal conversation, it certainly is not in a written piece,” Paul pontificates primly. Well, Paul, there are written pieces and written pieces, ranging in formality from grocery lists hastily scribbled on the backs of envelopes to official petitions to the Queen of England inscribed on foolscap. What I wrote was a letter to the editor, a flexible medium that gives latitude to a wide range of tones, although I myself have objected to some of the egregious insults purveyed by certain contributors to this column. 
Paul speculates that the editors of this column are Thais unfamiliar with the nuances of English. Aside from this being an insult to the management of The Nation and to Thai editors (and this is, after all, a Thai newspaper), I happen to know that at least two of the editors are native speakers of English who are perfectly familiar with the nuances of the language.
Paul concludes by admonishing me for using “the language of the street in official communication”. If you can pull your head out of the 17th century, Paul, there’s nothing wrong with the language of the street in our democracy-oriented 21st century, and this is just a letter to the editor – not an “official communication”.
Sorry to rattle on so pedantically, but I am, after all,
Ye Olde Pedant

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