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A conscious mangling of language

Thos of you who come to Coastalblog as your go-to source of celebrity news (lets face it, I'm ALL about the celebrity news) will doubtless be as shocked and saddened as I am by the news of the split of her out of the Royal Tenenbaums and him out of Coldplay. Likewise bemused that it's taken her a whole eleven years to realise that Coldplay are fucking terrible (I envisage a sudden moment of clarity visiting itself upon Ms Paltrow like lightning from a clear summer sky, maybe out shopping somewhere and hearing some of that maudlin warbling nonsense dribbling out of the stereo in some glossy shop, dropping her bags and clapping her hands to her mouth, a shocked look on her face, before rapidly grabbing her phone and ringing her lawyer).

Now regardless of your opinion of their respective canons (and mine's not high, to be fair), it ill behooves us to intrude upon people's private misery, so I'm not going to speculate further, plus, y'know, there's kids involved, and I'm probably going a bit soft in my old age. What I AM going to do is mock roundly the phrasing used by MS Paltrow when she announced their break-up. Break-up, that's a perfectly serviceable term, isn't it? Likewise "split" or, more baldly "no longer together". There we go, Gwynnie "Me and him out of Coldplay are no longer together. Now leave us alone while we divvy up the yoga mats." All perfectly reasonable. Does what it says on the tin.

So why in the name of David Crystal did she choose to say that they were "consciously uncoupling" (I'm leaving aside the coparenting bit as I would kind of take that as read)? What on earth is that supposed to mean? It sounds like someone removing a refuelling tube from a jet.

Now, if I were a proper writer I would use this as the jumping off point for a lengthy investigation of the bowdlerization of the poor old english language and segue neatly into an extended riff on the intellectual poverty of corporate speak. But alas, I'm not, I'm a bloke who has to get the kids ready for school, so I will leave this subject with this thought. If she talks like that in real life then perhaps he's the one who's taken eleven years to come to his senses.

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