Kiss My Culture

Blog: One Doesn’t Just Gingerly Do Anything

With nothing interesting to do than perhaps to sharpen all my pencils, I watched the action-bromancing-comedy Due Date last evening when something caught my attention. In one of the scenes, Robert Downey Jr.’s character, Peter Highman was emotionally retelling the story of the day when his dad left home and never to be seen again to Ethan Tremblay/Chase played by Zach Gali-whatever.

“I snuck into his room, I gingerly woke him up,” says Peter recalling that fateful day when his dad asked him to wake him up only to find out later that his old man had his suitcase waiting outside the house, ready to go.

While Ethan was insensitively laughing hysterically to Peter’s story, I was thinking, what kind of a gay word “gingerly” really is.

Now, I am not homophobic, you might be homosexual, but “gingerly” is gay.

I knew, rather fuzzily, what “gingerly” means. The dictionary describes the adverb or adjective as: with great care or delicacy and cautious; careful. But why “gingerly”? It’s a stupid word. I bet it has no relation to ginger, but come on, who wouldn’t relate it to that?

If I had no clue what “gingerly” was, I would have used it to relate to spices or for its medicinal properties. When put in a context, I could say that during this flu, “my nose feel gingerly annoyed”, or “We should gingerly accept what the doctor proposed.”

But to walk gingerly into a bar full of gun-trotting bandits, doesn’t make the protagonist sound all that timid. Actually, it makes him sound clueless.

Who came up with this word? A farmer? What was he doing? How do you exploit the fundamental uses of ginger in such a manner? How can the world accept this? I can’t.

Is this why the Gingerbread man behaves like he’s on a perceptual hormonal imbalance because he’s always so gingerly? Someone tell him (it’s a him, right?) to cut down on whatever drugs he’s on.

I hope the word “gingerly” dies a horrid death. But like the infamous font, Comic Sans, hope is as much as I can do. There’s nothing more annoying than to have a word come at you during a film that spoils your entire day. I could gingerly brush it off, but that’s beyond the point. “Gingerly” shouldn’t even exist.

Oh look, there’s even a movie called The Gingerbread Man, and Robert Downey Jr. is on it.

Too much ginger. This calls for a drink.