Death becomes her...

We are all familiar with death in his above pictured manifestation, black robes worn low, generous if outmoded gillette. I was chatting with an friend this weekend and he was telling me about a short story by Woody Allen, who happens to be very popular in Brazil. Indeed, as Brazil has adopted the Ramones as their own and are proud to say that they're more popular here than Queens, cinephiles with flexable metatarsels are want to say the same about Woody.

Is it really true, as they have told me here, that he can´t find funding for his films in the US? And if it is, would that be for artistic reasons or for those so emphatically stated by Mos Def in his solo debut comparsion with O.J.? (track 10 as stated by my compadre)

One theory goes that Mos had tried to find different director to fit in with his white-people-can´t-be-artists argument, but exhausted an entire rhymebook trying to flip 'Polanski', wisely discarding "couldn't keep it in his pants-ki."

Anyway, as my associate paraphrased the Allen story which in turn parodies the Seventh Seal, since he was speaking Portuguese, he called death a 'she.' This is because death as a noun is feminine, just as for instance, a pen is feminine. Indeed, a direct translation of portuguese would have everyone talking like sailors, "Ah the wind, look at him blow" or "How is your lawnmower? He's a little bit broken."

This is kind of funny because when an english speaker hears these gendered pronouns, we tend to picture pens or chairs or wind with the accompanying genetalia and facial hair, in the spirit world of their essence that is. Or at least I do.

In fact used to play the game- Why is that noun a man or woman? Why is the sea a he? Is the foam his beard? Because he´s strong? Couldn´t he be a girl, a harsh mistress that takes you down into her womb when you drown, poor sailor you? Maybe, I reason, its because when the gender was assigned they didn't know that life first came from the sea, in which case the womb cycle-of-life thing would be a shoo-in and the sea would be a girl.

But what all but the most silly second language learners learn is that when latin-speaker says these nouns, they don´t think about the gender, they assign it correctly as a matter of grammar, but they use he/she in the same way that we use 'it', and not in the spirit of rum-drinking, plank walking, barnacle-bearded seafarers.

So even though my associate called Death 'she,' if he (finding himself in a woody allen type position vis-a-vis the reapster and of a silly woody disposition) were to lift the robes of Death on a prank, he too would expect to find what could only be called a boner.

Say it like a surfer;

boooner