'it is life's great paradox, but there's nothing i prefer more than a game of scrabble..but nothing i prefer less than my opponents, who are always accusing me of putting out words that aren't real.
sure, if i put down a word and you haven't seen it before, it must be because it's not real. there's no chance there's a word you haven't encountered before, you know everything, you're the font of universal knowledge, you're a walking Funk and Wagnalls you arrogant fricking a-hole.
anyway, what has all this got to do with religion? well, if i'm playing a game of scrabble and i put down the word Rabbi, no-one's up in my face, no-one has a problem. even though it was originally a Hebrew word, they correctly identify it as a foreign word that's been absorbed into English. yet if i put down Qibla, which is in the Oxford English Dictionary, suddenly everyone's getting huffy, flapping their arms about, running around the rumpus room sending scrabble pieces flying everywhere, 'John there's no such word as Qibla'.
let me tell you what Qibla is. Qibla is the direction of the sacred stone in Mecca to which Muslims turn when praying. i mean a billion people on the planet face Qibla five times a day but no, you're right, you never heard of it at Xavier College, so it's not a real word, not like Eucharist.
but what really annoys me is as you can imagine most of my friends are left-wing pinkos and on any other issue would be falling over themselves to accommodate the richness of multicultural diversity. you put down Qibla and suddenly i'm playing with Pauline Hanson. i tried to explain it's an Arabic words, 'oh we live in Australia, we don't speak Arabic here we speak English.' listen hippy, when you break through the fence at Woomera Detention Centre and whip out the scrabble board, they're going to want to put down Qibla.
until next time, go to hell.'
- John Safran
sure, if i put down a word and you haven't seen it before, it must be because it's not real. there's no chance there's a word you haven't encountered before, you know everything, you're the font of universal knowledge, you're a walking Funk and Wagnalls you arrogant fricking a-hole.
anyway, what has all this got to do with religion? well, if i'm playing a game of scrabble and i put down the word Rabbi, no-one's up in my face, no-one has a problem. even though it was originally a Hebrew word, they correctly identify it as a foreign word that's been absorbed into English. yet if i put down Qibla, which is in the Oxford English Dictionary, suddenly everyone's getting huffy, flapping their arms about, running around the rumpus room sending scrabble pieces flying everywhere, 'John there's no such word as Qibla'.
let me tell you what Qibla is. Qibla is the direction of the sacred stone in Mecca to which Muslims turn when praying. i mean a billion people on the planet face Qibla five times a day but no, you're right, you never heard of it at Xavier College, so it's not a real word, not like Eucharist.
but what really annoys me is as you can imagine most of my friends are left-wing pinkos and on any other issue would be falling over themselves to accommodate the richness of multicultural diversity. you put down Qibla and suddenly i'm playing with Pauline Hanson. i tried to explain it's an Arabic words, 'oh we live in Australia, we don't speak Arabic here we speak English.' listen hippy, when you break through the fence at Woomera Detention Centre and whip out the scrabble board, they're going to want to put down Qibla.
until next time, go to hell.'
- John Safran
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