The Scariest Things People Can Tell You

“I don’t mean to impose, but your head’s on fire”

For centuries, man’s relationship with fire has fluctuated wildly between comfort and destruction. Fire keeps us warm, fire cooks our food, fire destroys our homes, fire gives us serious burns ranging from the third to the first degree. In summation, fire is a bloody schizophrenic elemental force.

You panic, your eyes roll wildly in their sockets and you begin to dance on the spot like a lizard on a particularly hot stone. An inflamed head is never an ideal scenario, it’s actually really bloody scary and an experience we spend most of our lives actively avoiding.

Should this nightmarish vision ever manifest itself in your reality, remember these three key words: Stop. Drop. Roll. Panic over, potential skin graft operations avoided.

“Mega lolz!”

To be honest, I’m massively disappointed that my computer’s spellchecker hasn’t put a squiggly red line of death under the word LOLZ, it certainly deserves one. Maybe if I write it in lower case…lolz. Nope, someone must have added it to the fucking dictionary. For fuck’s sake.

Barely acceptable as abbreviations, when lolz/mega lolz/ rofl/ lmao/lmfao etc are spewed forth in conversation, it becomes clear that you’re are talking with a complete lunatic and/or someone who has spent far too large a proportion of their life on MSN or some other online shop of horrors. Unleashing such a linguistic abhorrence upon a conversation is akin to doing a massive guff in the House of Lords or getting caught in a compromising situation with Ricky Tomlinson. It’s just not cricket. Totally unacceptable and, frankly, very frightening.

Basic grammatical rules aside, “dropping the L-bomb” instantaneously undermines and corrodes the thin veneer of respectability the perpetrator was originally hiding behind. I’m not generally a fan of casting judgements on people too quickly, but a casual “lol” at the end of a spoken sentence is enough to put me off a person for life. If you’re not the same then you damned well should be, these linguistic bandits need to be taught a lesson. Well, that or be deported.

“You’re pregnant”

For the majority of female students, discovering that last week’s casual liaison with “the cute one from the Rugby team that looks a bit like Dermot O’Leary” has resulted in some wholly unintentional consequences is rarely a cause for extravagant celebration. Unless you truly detest your degree course, in which case you may well be dusting off that vintage bottle of Moet you’d been saving for a special occasion. Unlikely, but well within the realms of possibility all the same.

On the whole however, pregnancy and further education rarely make – and please excuse the partially intentional pun here – the most comfortable of bedfellows. Not only is bringing infants into a formal learning environment a general all-round nightmare, but breastfeeding whilst delivering a presentation on the merits of Duverger’s law of plurality has the potential to be somewhat embarrassing. As an addition to that, surely there must be some sort of statistic that shows that a disproportionately large number of children brought up in halls of residence end up in lunatic asylums or something. ADHD at the very least. I’m just making things up now, a frightening occurrence in itself.

“Daddy would never stand for this”

Picture the scene in your head. You’re in the queue for the bar, you have been for quite a while – it’s a busy night – but you’ve managed to get chatting to the lovely blonde you’ve been standing next to for the last twenty minutes or so. You’ve never met this girl before but the conversation’s been flowing more smoothly than the smoothest of smoothies. That’s really bloody smooth. What a nice girl. Is she the one? “Yes”, you say to yourself, “She must be the one”.

The wait for alcohol goes on but you don’t mind, you’re 90% sure that you’ve pulled. She even likes football and doesn’t mind Radiohead that much. You’re about to take the leap, you’re about to ask for her number. Then, in the space of seconds, just a few short words, it all falls apart at the seams.

You can’t quite believe what she’s gone and said, she was meant to be the girl of your dreams. You don’t want it to be true, you desperately want to rewind just thirty seconds but you can’t, she’s already said it. You’re so very scared. You start to panic. Why did she have to do this? Why? I didn’t think she was “one of those”. Pain permeates throughout your entire being. You don’t want to believe it but you have to confront the truth, she did say it. She really did.

“This queue’s taking such a long time, isn’t it? Daddy would never stand for this.”

There’s plenty more fish in the sea.

“Boo!”

I thought I’d finish with an old classic, the godfather of scare tactics and the practical joker’s closest companion for centuries. Devastatingly effective in the right hands, the word “boo” has become synonymous with instantaneous panic and, if prone to bashfulness, some may flatly refuse to utter the word to a goose. Not any other birds, just geese. Inexplicable.

Perfect for a plethora of circumstances, “boo”, despite having virtually no meaning other than the registration of discontent by a Neanderthal, is a potent weapon for those wishing to frighten friends, family and/or various unsuspecting members of the public. The word’s effect can even be redoubled when deployed in combination with an exaggerated jump from behind a sofa, wall or other convenient fixture. Amazing.

Unleash a casual “boo!” this Halloween and, without a shadow of a doubt, you’ll be the most ghoulish guest at whichever party you choose to attend and will doubtless become the toast of whatever “scene” you associate yourself with. Just take care not to go too mental with the pumpkins.

Chris Mann