12. The inside story of words

Google Images

In anticipation of other such texts with more complex rephrasing, and in the hope that it has whetted your appetite for dictionary work – which is essential for someone who wants to capture meanings – here is the full text on plastic surgery:

<<AMERICAN TEENS AND BODYBUILDERS SEEK COSMETIC IMPROVEMENTS
[Adapted from "The Secret of Life", in Distinction by Mark Foley and Diane Hall]

The Californian obsession with physical perfection is no longer confined to middle-aged women. Across the United States teenagers are going under the knife, financed and encouraged by doting parents who believe bodily perfection to be a more desirable birthday present than a stereo or a car. And in Beverley Hills surgeons have developed a technique by which men no longer have to spend hours in gyms to achieve bulging muscles.

  Tiffany White, a schoolgirl aged seventeen from suburban Los Angeles, never liked her ' chubby cheeks. ‘A lot of people said I looked like Bette Midler and that really bothered me,’ she said. In the old days she would have had to lump it. But this year she joined thousands of other American teenagers in opting for surgery and had the fat vacuumed out and her nose remodelled while she was at it. Once the domain of the rich and vain, aesthetic surgery, as the practitioners prefer to call it, is doing wonders for adolescent self-esteem and making millions for doctors, at the same time prompting qualms among professional bodies.

Teenagers have become a big market for plastic surgery,’ said Dr Martin Sullivan, an Illinois surgeon who says between eight and ten teenagers consult him every month. Some surgeons estimate that teenagers account for 25 per cent of their business. According to the latest figures, last year 117,000 teenagers under eighteen had rhinoplasty (or ‘nose-jobs’). Almost as many had ear-pinning, followed by chin augmentation and then dermabrasion - a sort of sandpapering technique which removes acne scars from the skin. A small but increasing number of Asian teenagers are having blepharoplasty, an eyelid operation which produces a more rounded Caucasian look. The use of silicone muscle to correct deformities has been widespread for some time, but plastic surgeons now report that 20 per cent of their clients are males seeking decorative muscles. In Beverley Hills Dr Mel Bircoll has turned more than fifty puny thoraxes into brawny specimens using a technique which inserts two or three lumps of silicone into the chest through a small nick in the armpit. Aside from chest muscles, surgeons report that the next most popular operation is to the cheeks and jaw. ‘People want the square-featured Schwarzenegger look,’ said Dr Darryl Hodgkinson. While many surgeons do not believe artificial muscles for males will ever catch on in a big way, they are optimistic about the growth prospects for teenage cosmetic surgery. They argue that surgery can help cure the insecurity and the self-consciousness that comes from a lack of self-esteem. >> 

Google Images

Undoubtedly, this is only one of the many articles which tackle the subject of physical perfection. There are also some very good ideas that came up in your posts, among them the importance of the genetic factor; these will be the basis for future posts, and – it goes without saying –aren’t meant to talk you out of posting your comments to any of the articles published so far, on the contrary! Feel free to express your opinion for as many of them as you wish, as many times you like: they will all become threads for future comments. 

But let’s take a little break, shall we? This goes to all those linguists who patiently gather the meaning of words and phrases and foster language along the years so that we, restless consumers of information, may render our ideas more clearly and precisely.

There is at least one hidden story behind each word – well, not really, there are some words with such a long and winding history that it would be practically impossible to keep track of their adventure.

This one goes in memoriam to John Lennon and George Harrison on behalf of Paul McCartney – a song with <simple> lyrics, re-mastered and offered to audiences all over the world: Blackbird, which came as a revelation of what the spirit of togetherness may create in an artist’s rich and powerful inspiration.   

Blackbird w/lyrics

There are two meanings to this song: there’s the actual bird, which may mean something only for those who live close to open spaces (a lot more could be said about the British use of bird for what is known as chick in General American). There’s another, hidden meaning emerging form what inspired Paul to write the song. While on a tour across America, McCartney heard a woman screaming and saw a lot of police cars pulling up. The police had her handcuffed and beaten. An enormous crowd had gathered, and Paul thought the black woman had committed a crime. It turned out that all she did was to sit in the whites’ section. You can notice Paul’s shock in the adjectives he used: dead, dark, sunken, broken, black; they all speak of unfairness. So also, the verbs are powerful vehicles evoking the common history of black people: fly, singing, free, arise, waiting, see. There is also the sound of a foot beating in the background: at McCartney’s insistence, a metronome had to be used, and so evoke footsteps – the marching of all the African Americans along their history.