Smack! “Let me not to the marriage of two minds…”
Shakespeare is not impressed by the smack
Let me not to the marriage of two¹ minds
Accept imprecaments.² Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or lets jests go unpunish’d in reprove.³
O no! How could that ever-scathing hack,⁴
Chris Rock, sling tempests and he’s ne’er shaken!
A mega-star tolerates no such smack
Mess with his women,⁵ the beast awaken.
If this be error and upon me prov’d
Let stop such sh!t. ’Tis outrageous, uncouth.⁶
- Tom Tordillo
William Shakespeare was a fierce defender of the English language. In this time in my life, in this moment, I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to write…Well, OK, best not to judge someone’s words when they are not at their best — particularly after they’ve done a bad, bad thing.
Google tells me a 10-line poem is called an “octet” (seriously?), a “dizain” (from Old French!), or a decastich (say what?). I like “abbreviated sonnet.” Attention spans are short; 14 lines are long, and parodying any more lines by Bill the Quill might rouse an angry ghost.
Footnotes and references.
- Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 uses the term, “true minds.” Apparently Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith have an open marriage, which means my choice of replacing “true” with “two” is somewhat ironic. If you ever read this and see me, Mr. Smith, please do not smack me: I have no idea how your relationship(s) work(s), and wish to avoid both creepy voyeurism or prudish judgmentalism.
- “Imprecament” is a neologism, that is, a new word created by poetic license (aka, “a made up word”). It ought to exist. To “imprecate” is to call down a curse upon someone. Chris Rock’s ‘attack’ upon Jada Pinkett-Smith was not exactly “imprecatory” — at least, not in the Biblical Psalms calling for the destruction of an adversary. Then again, there’s a remarkable Biblical punishment for mocking baldness (if you don’t know the verse, try googling 2 Kings 2:23–24…it’s pretty grim).
3. Reprove” doesn’t rhyme with “love.” Neither did “remove” in Shakespeare’s original Sonnet 116. Except maybe in Elizabethan English. The original is a kickass sonnet. You should read it. We should all stop obsessing about “the smack.”
4. Referring to Chris Rock as an “ever-scathing hack” refers to “Everybody Hates Chris” (excellent cast, and occasionally excellent writing). Rock grates everybody. The Oscars are cheesy. Grating cheese is great — but grating even the greatest people cuts through skin. It hurts. Still, Rock seems to have surged in popularity since the smack.
5. I emphasized “his” in this line . The part of the whole incident that bothers me is the notion that Smith was protecting “his” women, or rather, by feeling impelled to ‘protect,’ he made a claim on their light. It is one thing to protect one’s children. “Protecting” and adult woman fully capable of determining her own response trivializes that woman, letting some man posture as the defender. In Hollywood, image is everything: all imagery starts with light.
One famously bald Black woman Will Smith did not claim to be protecting is Ayanna Pressley. Pressley is a badass. She had some things to say about discrimination on race-based hairstyles on March 18, 2022. She had mixed feelings about “the smack” too — first cheering, then reconsidering that, deleting a tweet, and stating she is on Team Jada. You know what else she did in 2022? Helped pass the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which is only about 100+ years overdue. But she’s bald so…
Everyone is getting hung up on the racism or other angles to this story. I wish more people were paying attention to Pressley, and more importantly, to efforts to stop lynching.
6. I do not know if the use of profanity is permitted on this forum, so…hopefully I’m not being intolerably uncouth. “The smack” does bother me. Other people expressed why eloquently (check out Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s eloquent takedown).
‘Uncouth’ behavior replicates easily. A talentless hack might emulate Will Smith’s smack on TikTok, monetize the gambit — as might any number of copycats, all repeating a ‘performance.’ Everything that can be monetized WILL be monetized. I do not want a world in which “the smack” becomes a frequent occurrence. There’s way too many guns around; that shit will escalate.
