stimulate good minds / amuse the intelligent / crucify idiots who should know better

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wordsworth

 

“Ortho! Ortho!”

The two syllables ‘ortho’ hail from the Greek word meaning ‘straight’. There are a million gags in there, but most of them would be gratuitous – and irrelevant to this piece. Suffice to say that I am orthosexual, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

However, I have an inbuilt distrust of orthodoxy: orthodox people tend to be the robots telling us how this is the only way to do things. They have, over the centuries, come up with everything from The Inquisition to Marxism. For example, what I’d like to have is – instead of the Russian Orthodox Church – the Russian Unorthodox Church. I’ve no idea what it would get up to (the deification of Stalin, perhaps) but it would be far more interesting to tell one’s fellow-diners “I am a member of the Greek Unorthodox Church”. I could claim to believe in the inherent eternity of Calamari: given how long it takes to chew and digest, this would be entirely credible.

But just to detox for a minute, ‘ortho’ is found in an awful lot of English words. Orthopaedic I can understand – you’ve got a curved spine, orthopaedic surgeons can offer you a straight one. But what are we to make of orthodontics? Well, go to the dentists’ websites, and sure enough it seems to be all about making one’s teeth straight. However, while the teeth become straight, the cost of such a procedure sets the bank balance far enough back to create the worst kind of overdraft. This is both more irksome and more embarrassing than an overbite.

In literary circles these days, there are far too many authordox writers. Some of them write authorised biographies: does this mean that they will stick rigidly to the orthodox view of the celeb in question? I don’t know, but I associate authordox writing with chicklit, the Tragic Childhood genre, and formulaeic marketing. On the whole, I’d prefer to be unauthordox – which in fiction, I most certainly am, being unpublished. And being an unauthorised biographer, of course, is by far the most lucrative thing to be – just ask Kitty Kelly. Unfortunately, as a bloke, I don’t like the sound of unauthorised: it suggests removal of vital parts, or even being fired.

The New Penguin English Dictionary tells us that ‘ortho’ is more exactly applied to ‘that which is correct’. Hence political correctness, as in orthodoxy. Here again, my very strong feeling is that those who are straight may often not be entirely correct: most straight friends I have are hugely incorrect, in that they regard the term ‘homophobia’ as an incorrect description of their general mindset. And almost every orthodoxy I’ve come across has been proved incorrect in the end. Far too many of them, it seems to me, are orthoriatarian.

Perhaps the worst thing one could imagine might be an authoritarian orthodontist. You might enter the dentist’s surgery, expecting little more than a check-up and the odd filling, only to find a Nazi in full SS regalia (callipers in hand) asserting that “Vee vill haff Blitzkrief on your rotten, decadent teeth, and zen ze scorched-earth policy until ze New Order iss in place”. On the other hand, the more insistent sort of orthopaedic specialist insisting on more backbone from the patient could turn out to be a pain in the neck.

But ultimately (and I too did not know the word’s meaning until yesterday) the thing I find most disturbing in this whole Greek business is ‘orthogenesis’. The general idea here is that every social culture since Homo sapiens got off all fours has been through precisely the same process: confused tribes engaging in civil war, followed by rigid hierarchy, discipline and a decent-sized empire, only to be followed in turn by loss of said empire, lots of queens mincing about, orgies, hippies and the politically correct telling us that all those Barbarians at the gate are just gagging to be part of our multicultural society, and then another civil war.

So there we have it: ‘ortho’ is (in one form or another) a straight line: it goes up, and then it goes down. Which is sort of a metaphor for stock markets, soccer teams, film stars – in fact, life in general.

On balance, I’d prefer to be authentic.

 

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