Remember the good old days, when outfit and attitude (pictured above) alone where sufficient to clearly identify yourself as goth?
Alas, those days are gone – statistics prove that, nowadays, goths are confused for emos with depressing regularity. (Depressing, that is, to any member of either group who wasn’t depressed to begin with.) I see only one hope for goths to survive as a distinctive subculture: immediate re-adoption of the Gothic language.
For too long, goths relied solely on the linguistic idiosyncrasies of Bram Stoker and Anne Rice stitched together to set themselves apart in their manner of speaking – with the Gothic language, they’ll finally dispose of an idiom that is completely hermetic to outsiders.
You can start off your studies on the subject with some handy everyday phrases, before moving on to more comprehensive lessons or a more scholarly resource. (That last bit comes courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin, where, coincidentally, there’s supposed to be a couple of great goth clubs.)
You think I’m confusing something, here? Well, at least I’m not the first one.
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