Naming the Nuisance.

I know one of those people who make it a part time career to bombard their e-mail contacts with Funny Things I Found on the Internet. They have subject lines like ‘Another Very Funny Irish Joke’ or ‘Why Women Don’t Have Balls.’ Unfortunately, I’m listed among his contacts and I get about five a week of the damn things.

When he started this unfortunate habit, I read the first two. I found them trite and distinctly unfunny, so now I delete them unread. But it’s becoming a bit of a nuisance. I’ve thought of the various options I could take to stop it happening, but there are reasons why I don’t want to go down any of those roads so I carry on deleting them. I just wish he would stop.

Such people usually have a weak sense of humour, and they’re arrogant enough to assume that everybody else is the same. There ought to be a term for them, rather as we call people who like to be gratuitously abusive in forum and blog posts ‘trolls.’ Maybe ‘clowns’ would do; clowns are distinctly unfunny, aren’t they? But it isn’t pejorative enough. I want it to be pejorative. Thinking on.