AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

For earlier Chapters and an explanation of this dreadful story, see blog: The Cardiff Grandma. WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh. In the previous episode, Samantha Panther deep into the mysterious luxembourgoise palace. Now, Wence Peppet aka Wiggton in pursuit of the oblivious Rhoda Crwys.

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 46
Rhoda’s true love was that of suburban myths. What had begun as an area of expanded focus for her thesis had in truth become the limelight. Context-free inter-employability in atypical social groups and disadvantaged communities, she felt, was inextirpably rooted in what those social groups and communities believed. This had led to a revised taxonomisation of ‘belief’ itself and its semantic relation to credence, faith, delusion, and superstition. And how did these control the categorisation of such constructs as truth, fact, history, legend, myth, anecdote, rumor, old-wives tales and no comment? Not to mention the recent trailblazing research in the U.S. into the field of ‘bullshit’, or bollocks (see footnote) .

Rhoda’s reading had led her inexorably to the unshakeable conviction that ‘bullshit’ could perhaps be hypothetically invested with modifiers, scaled assessments of veracity ranging from ‘jive’ to ‘utter’. Of these, the pre-determined subhead of the noun phrase identifiable in the receeding antecedant category, i.e. the lexical entity Forceit (1987) refers to as a taboo adjectival linker but Partright (1992) notes can act as any one of the three above items listed below and after, ‘fucking’ was found to have the oldest etymological history of usage in collusion with ’bullshit’. To her surprise, this was also the most anciently cited in conjunction with the word ‘fact’. Hence ‘facts’ and ‘bullshit’ positively seemed to share a common linguistic collocational ancestor in ‘fucking’ and thus be genetically related!

Using the physics principles underlying the lever and fulcrum seen in the crudest of teeter-totters, the Welsh Student constructed a balsa wood model demonstrating the point of equilibrium at which each was simultaneously exerting an equal but opposite reaction on the other. But she had in her research become intimately familiar with the landmark ruling by the US Supreme Court in Brown v. Kansas and agreed that ‘separate but equal’ was an unviable principle. The two concepts, ‘fact’ and ‘bullshit’ would have to be integrated to achieve true equality.

Had she overlooked an exciting new avenue of research? If she had, would she lose marks? With no time to spare, she ran a lightning strike corpus linguistic analysis using a ‘goggling’ technique revealing that the terms ‘the fucking facts’ and ‘fucking bullshit’ were most highly correlated by subject matter: wherever one was implemented to appraise a given postulated phenomenon, the other appeared equally often in different sources, ex. ‘extensive subterranean underground network of tunnel systems honeycombing Cardiff’ was appraised as ‘a fucking fact’ as often as it was rated ‘fucking bullshit’. Eureka!

In the nick of time, she finished downloading the results onto the five pack of CDs she’d thought might be useful. With the second hand ticking just seconds before the zenith, she was off. Her Lickity Lousewatch said 7:00.

Rhoda Crwys didn’t recognize the voice, but she hadn’t time to think about that right now. Because if she were right, and in theory she could be, her suburban myth was as much fact as it was bullshit. Meaning…the vast excavation beneath the city was 50% true. How to find the evidence of that fifty per cent? If there were any secret unseen tunnels, where would they be? Underground! And where was the most ground available under which to be? The largest hill…Largest Hill! The hill with the mansion on top, where the pursesnatcher lived.

The clock still ticking, she hastily jammed the CDs into her pwrs after carefully labeling each with time, date and identifying comment, scrambled into her revealing raincoat and hurried out the door after checking the stove; she tested the doorknob to be certain she’d locked it correctly, and hastened down the street. Furtiving up the street behind her was the shadowy figure of the man once known as WPiegpgpteotn -- a decompensating man whose cover was running thin, as thin as the remnants of the fog that surrounded his shadowy figure. Ahead of him, a dog barked a greeting at Rhoda Crwys, behind him a dog had suddenly stopped barking, forever.

1. Frankfurt, Harry G., Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Princeton University, On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005. “More pertinent is Frankfurt's focus on intentions... Bullshitting[ ] is not exactly lying, and bullshit remains bullshit whether it's true or false.” (Mary Park for Amazon.com) $9.95: 80 pages On Bullshit, English

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