Mental shorthand is a variation on specialist language and family language. When people who share a lot of experiences in common communicate they often use words and phrases that other people do not understand: e.g. My father-in-law talks about getting off at Bollington as a euphemism for withdrawl or coitus interruptus. That dates him, the railway line finishing at Macclesfield going via Bollington has been disused since the sixties. Spit or swallow? Sod that, you're getting off at Bollington. Also getting off at Edge Hill (Liverpool) and Getting off at Redfern (Sydney).

One up from family language and trade jargon is personal mental shorthand, which never leaves the confines of your own brain. The job is to encapsulate complicated concepts in shorter and easier to handle symbols for use in your own personal thoughts. Private words. I'll show you mine if you show me yours:-

Laxative Abuser

A certain kind of old woman of either sex and any age. Fastidious, pedantic, pernickety obsessed by trivia and appearances.

Laxative abusers tend to come into the shop and spend two hours making a bad decision.

Screwdriver syndrome

The tendency of people faced with difficult and possibly intractable problems to use the tools they are familiar with; e.g. using a screwdriver to open a paint tin, stir the contents, poke holes in things etc.

Plus the military's response to the landing of a flying saucer or a giant lizard in downtown Tokyo; circle it with troops, keep people back, panic.

The approach of "anarchists"; march, yell, throw stones at the police, trash McDonald's, turn over expensive cars and loot electrical retailers. It doesn't matter what the cause is, the solution is always the same.

The response of Russian governments to tragedy: deny it, shut up about it, lie about it, then later admit it and say it will not happen again.

The approach of terrorists to either an event or a lack of events; bomb and kill and run away.

Sushi syndrome

The way in which the differences between one complicated state of affairs and another can be summed up and explained by any one convenient difference between the two. So the UK economy was in decline relative to that of Japan because of any one of the following: better education, better care for the elderly, protectionism, export led growth, oriental cunning, better discipline, losing the war, lower defence spending, better unions or the consumption of raw fish.

A recent example of Sushi Syndrome is the fairly constant stream of scare stories about crime figures in Britain, Australia and other countries put about by proponants of the US gun lobby. Anything bad that happens in Britain is directly caused by the limits on legal firearm ownership, whether that is muggings, burglaries, arrests for illegal possession of firearms (??) or possibly even the poor performance of the England cricket team. See this example among millions of others if you type Britain, crime and gun into any search engine what you find is the same story, sushi syndrome, Britain has gone to the dogs and banning guns caused it. However, if you restrict your researches to UK based sites that picture vanishes. Hardly any British people make that link, how odd. Perhaps we are too close to the problem to see the “obvious” cause?

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