by FREDERICA VON McTOAST-HYPHEN, Alternate Reality News Service Pop Culture Writer
Bonking was once a slang expression for bumping uglies, and may still be in places in the English-speaking world that don’t have the Internet. (Bumping uglies is a slang expression for…umm…go ask your father!) However, in the last couple of years, bonking has taken on a completely different meaning: meeting your soul-mate in the middle of a busy intersection.
The English language can be salumptuous that way.
Why has the language morphed mightier than a Power Ranger in this specific way? Imagine that you’re walking down a city street. You’re watching – what? Why are you walking down a street? Because…because your car broke down and your brother won’t lend you his and you don’t want to pay for public transit because why should you pay for public transit when you’ve got a perfectly good ca – well, a car that will be perfectly good once you get it back from the shop and –
You had to get yourself started, didn’t you? Now, where was – okay. As you walk down the street, you’re watching an episode of Killjoys – dour bastard that you are – on your cellphone when it tinkles a brief excerpt from Beethoven’s ode to a daytime soap opera character named “Erica.” This is a sign that your mother has just sent you a text message. On the one hand, you want to ignore it; on both hands, the guilt! So you pause the show and open your phone app and read BONK!
Your cranium has just made intimate contact with that of a cute little redhead who was reading Thomas Pynchon for Dummies on her cellphone when she received a text message from her BFFFN (Best Friend Forever For Now – some people are so deep into their commitment issues that they have acronyms!) about Drake doing a cover of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and she had Googled it to see if there was any truth to BONK!
“It was love at first bonk,” said Mavis Atriades, who, other than being a statuesque brunette who is allergic to acronyms, could have been the woman in the previous paragraph. “Oh, sure, I had to have three stitches and suffered from migraines for a couple of weeks, but I had also found the man I wanted to be with for the rest of my life! Or, at least until my phone battery died.”
Literally…dozens of singles are taking to the streets hoping for a chance encounter with romance. “Oh, you’re being too modest,” said Romeo Baddalabuoy, author of Love is a Powerful, Wonderful Sickening Pain in the Head: New Frontiers in Romance. “There must be hundreds of singles looking for love on the streets. Yes. I think so. Hundreds.”
In his book, Baddalabuoy suggests that this is not the first time that relationships started on major metropolitan thoroughfares. Throughout Europe in the 19th century, when you walked down the street you were always at risk of having the contents of a bedpan flung on your head from a second or third floor balcony. Yes. He thinks so. A bedpan. Sometimes, young men would look up and, seeing that the flinger was a fair maiden, fall deeply in love.
Relationships begun this way were often referred to as “scozcobbles.” Baddalabuoy points out that they were no more likely to end in wives disappearing into attics and madness than relationships that started in more traditional ways.
A sufficiently large number of relationships that begin with a meeting of the…heads, if not minds has occurred that an etiquette has started forming around them. For example, it has become customary for the man to offer to call the paramedics after a romantic street collision. If no blood is flowing, however, it is quite acceptable for the woman to suggest that they duck into the nearest coffee shop to trade health insurance information.
If you’re looking for a same sex life partner, Baddalabuoy advises that you’ll increase your odds by walking down the streets in gay neighbourhoods; if you’ve just come out and you’re not sure where they are, try the Rainbow Streets II app (not to be confused with the Rainbow Streets Unnumbered app, which shows you where in your city toxic waste has made lovely multicoloured patterns on the road). If you aren’t gay and share a bonk with somebody of the same sex, it is currently acceptable to run in the opposite direction shrieking and hold your head under a cold shower for at least seven minutes.
It’s early days. Social etiquette evolves.
Critics of the new romantics (hey, that’s a catchy phrase – I wonder if anybody has every thought of it before…) say that meeting potential sweethearts on the street is too random to lead to lasting relationships. Baddalabuoy has a response for that: “If it’s a choice between getting drunk on vodka in a sleazy bar or getting drunk on Tolstoy on a clean city street, I’ll choose the one that won’t destroy my liver!”