Danny Katz has it spot on - no one is happy being what they are anymore. Please read:

What happened to calling a couch a couch?
Danny Katz
March 13, 2008

Driving down Dandenong Road, and I get stuck at the lights beside a builder’s ute — I know it’s a builder’s ute because it’s got a builder’s ladder strapped to the roof, and a builder’s wheelbarrow tossed in the back, and a big boofhead builder sitting in the driver’s seat. But no, I’m wrong, this is no builder at all, because there’s a logo on the side of the ute that says “Building Practitioner”. Oh sorry, this guy is clearly a highly qualified DOCTOR OF BUILDING, a surgeon-in-residence of residences, with a PhD in the Biochemical Cardiology of Bathroom Renos (Honours, No Job Too Big Or Too Small).

What a wanker, I think to myself, and I lean out the window and give him a you-big-wanker stare, but after the lights have changed, and he’s two blocks away, and I’ve done a U-turn and am facing the opposite way.

Driving some more, I pull up at a furniture shop; I’ve come here to buy a new couch because my old couch is all frayed and limp and upholstered in a finely woven blend of take-away Pad Thai noodles and liquefied thigh fat. But I’m wrong about this place, this isn’t a furniture shop at all, because the sign out the front says “Homeware Gallery” — oh sorrrrrrrr-eeee this is clearly an Art Gallery Of Furnishings, a place where you’d buy a Jackson Pollock-spattered bookcase or an ottoman from the Ottoman Empire.

I go inside and a furniture salesman comes up to me, all Saba-suited and slick-haired — but I’m wrong again, he’s not a salesman, because the label on his lapel says “Domestic Interiors Consultant”. He says, “Can I help you sirrrrrrr?” and I say, “Why yes you cannnnnn, I’d like to look at your range of couches please” and he says, “Oh you mean our COLLECTION of urban MODULAR units”, because couches now comes in “collections”, and they’re all “modular”, so that every bit of couch can be swapped with every other bit of couch, like some kind of saucy, sordid sofa swinger’s club.

This is all too wankish for me, so I go next door to another furniture shop, but I don’t bother going inside because this one’s called The Sofa Workshop and I don’t particularly want to see sofa-beds workshopping scenes from Greek tragedies, or a Jason Recliner doing a Theatresports exercise and pretending to be a big French pouffe.

Driving back home, I pass suburban restaurants that have mysteriously re-spelled themselves into “Ristorantes”, and fruit shops that have magically turned into “Fruitisseries” and I start thinking about how nobody’s content to be what they are any more — we live in a euphemistic world where everyone and everything wants to sound bigger, better, more bitchin’ than they actually are.

Now, stay-at home parents are called Domiciliary Progeny Engineers. Council garbagemen are Civic Toxicological Hygienists. Stenchy old boozers sleeping on bus benches are Olfactory-Impaired Al Fresco Dysfunctionistas. A dog turd in a public park is a Municipal Colonic Canine Installation.

Everything’s talking itself up: you can’t just buy chocolate ice-cream from an ice-cream parlour (a Techno-Frappa Gelatorium) — now it’s called Wickkkked Heavenly Cocoa n’ Creme Therapy, but it tastes the same as the 40-litre tub of brown ice-confection from Aldi. You can’t just buy a normal pizza from a pizzeria (a Wood-Fired Peasant Mountain-Bread Trattoria): now it’s all tandoori abalone pizza or minted prunes pizza. Dominos is now doing a pizza called Seven Meats — I didn’t even know there WERE seven meats.

How I miss the old days when a couch was a couch and a pizza was a pizza and a builder didn’t practise laparoscopic pancreatic wallboard surgery.

Those simple honest days before we turned into a society of jumped-up, grandiloquent, self-important pomps living in a state of chronic WANKORIFFIA.