Electrocution - A Sure-fire Cause of Death

So I was watching Brainiac the other night, when I discovered myself talking to my telly. Or to be more accurate, blasting it with fiery invective. This is not typical behaviour. I generally reserve these outbursts for when nasty little toadies like Howard or Nelson rear their ugly heads and attempt to convince us that when they bugger us up the arse until we’re bleeding in the name of the economy, they really have our best interests at heart (yes, I know they can’t hear me. But it beats bottling it up, cramming my soul-destroying rage into the dark and dingy corners of my mind until it can be repressed no longer and I snap, and as the red mist clouds my vision I know the only way to sate the thirst for blood that howls from every fibre of my being is to go out and stab a conservative in the eyeball over and over and over again with a decorative letter opener. Shouting at an inanimate object may be unhealthy, but it’s healthier (not as much fun, though) than the alternative.)

And I do like Brainiac. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you do. I’ve heard it described as a cross betwixt Mythbusters and Bloke’s World, which is a fairly apt description. Sure, some (OK, a lot) of the science is a bit dodgy, but since most of the experiments involve a)explosions b)scantily clad women c)beer or d) some combination of the above, it’s fairly harmless. And anything which gets the kiddies interested in science has got to be a good thing.

Those who know what a nerd I am, or perhaps deduced it from the two previous sentences, may be inclined to think that it was some scientific inaccuracy which invoked my fiery wrath. But they would be mistaken: I long ago resigned myself to the fact that Brainiac is riddled with scientific inaccuracies and stopped worrying about them, and view it as mindless entertainment - a chance to switch off my brain for an hour and enjoy the explosions and tits.

No, ‘twas a linguistic bollocks-up which got my goat so. You see, they have this segment where they hook up a guy with some electrodes which, when activated, will send a mild current through his body, resulting in some degree of pain and involuntary muscle spasms. Then they get him to perform some task requiring a reasonable degree of manual dexterity, and which usually makes a quite a mess when his muscles contract as the electrodes are activated, such as shaving (ouch). They call this segment ‘Things you can’t do while being electrocuted’.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been electrocuted. Oh, that’s right, you can’t, because you’re fucking dead. That’s what the word means: death by electricity. It’s pretty obvious if you actually think about it for half a second: electro- (from electricity) -cution (from execution). It is true that all the tasks they have set for their victim are things you can’t do while being electrocuted. But remaining on the mortal coil is also something which, by definition, you cannot do while being electrocuted and which their victim most demonstrably does.

Brainiac was just the proverbial straw which broke the donkey’s back, mostly because it’s English, and you’d think that if anyone knew how to correctly use the English language it would be the English. But I’ve heard far too many people talk about having being ‘electrocuted’. If you are talking, you haven’t been electrocuted, unless you were clinically dead and then resuscitated, or you are a zombie. I would hazard a guess that most dickheads who talk about having being ‘electrocuted’ fall into neither category. Use the bloody word properly or don’t use it at all. We have a perfectly acceptable term for the sensations associated with a non-fatal current passing through the body: electric shock. Repeat after me: electric shock. Was that so fucking hard?

So here’s what I’m going to do. If I hear someone talking about having being electrocuted, I will ask them how long they were technically dead for (I figure someone who has been technically dead would know this). If they tell me, I shall let them go about their business. If they growl and say “Brains!” I shall do the Harold, because it’s never wise to annoy a zombie. But if they say “What?” or “Huh?” then I shall kill them where they stand. That way, electrocution, be it real electrocution or ‘electrocution’, will be the cause of their death. And I won’t have to put up with wankers who persist in riding roughshod over the English language.

Dan Carmody