The Bae-ne of my Existance

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I realize that I am growing out of touch with the rest of world. This is all thanks to a combination of age, and a general loathing of humanity all together. OK, that last example may be a little extreme. Odds are this is really due to the simple fact that as I get older, the less I care what anyone thinks. That's a pretty nice feeling to have. After spending most of my twenties feeling like I had to change myself to fit in with everyone, I'm mostly comfortable being who I am now. With this is mind, I simply must take a moment to discuss something that I found myself becoming irritated over during a sleepless night I had recently. I can't stand the word "bae."

"Bae" is a term invented by "the young people" in an ever growing butchering of the English language to refer to the person you are currently in "love" with. In the modern era of snap chatting your body parts and tindering for love, it seems that having to actually use a pet name like "baby" is just simply too much anymore. Maybe it's that Justin Bieber ruined the word "baby" for us all? You can't fling a dead cat on social media without hitting some young set who are cloyingly referring to each other as "bae" all the live long day.

Some of you, who might in fact be young, could be thinking to yourselves right now "Don't step on our love, old man!!!" (because in my mind, all young people are juvenile delinquents from the 1950s), and I'm sure others are wondering why I hate this term so much. On the one hand, I just find it annoying. "Do you wanna be my bae?", "Oh, I just love my bae!", and the old chestnut "You're the best bae there ever was, bae!" It makes me wanna find the romance section of a Hallmark store and burn it the ground while yelling "I am the god of hellfire!"

I'm sure some of it also stems from the fact that when it comes to love and romance, I'm a little bitter. Something which clashes quite deeply with the fact that I consider myself an old romantic at heart. This is one of the many reasons I will brake down crying during my future interview with Oprah. Pet names are one thing, but being so lazy that we have to chop syllables off of words is beyond the realms of acceptance. I have no problem with the term "babe," and I've even used it myself on the rare occasion I had a reason to.

Yet, how we could have possibly gone from "babe" being too cumbersome that we had to shorten it to "bae" is just downright confusing. Who made this decision? Why do I want to know this? Because I wanna know who to punch for this at the next family gathering (which granted is unlikely to occur after the "roundhouse kick" incident of 2009). I suppose at its core the reason why the "b" had to be ejected from "babe" to become "bae" is that romance is dead. I'm not saying that couples aren't romantic anymore, or that love is dead, but the type of romantic gestures that we grew up seeing in every MGM musical are kinda six feet under.

Modern dating culture is almost like eBay the home game, we're not looking for anyone who makes us feel good about ourselves, as much as we just auction off our attention to the highest bidder. What starts with "I'll give you 100 baes for your love" slowly becomes "Yes, I'll accept that, as I feel pressured to be in a relationship I don't really want to be in." This is not to say that I love the single life, I have my nights when I can get just about as lonely as the next person. It's on nights like that when I find playing "Blood and Chocolate" by Elvis Costello & The Attractions* to be a very good thing.

I think the best option I have is to invent my own inversion of "bae" for when I do myself on the occasional date. Perhaps I should just stand up at the dinner table and yell for all to hear "baa ram ewe!" I think that would get some attention, and perhaps some local press coverage. Head my words young people, get a dictionary and don't be afraid of the letters that were in words to begin with. Mmmkay? 

*A 1986 album about love and relationships that is one of the angriest and most brutal records in the Elvis Costello catalog.

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