Phrases that annoy me: Part 3

"It's only a silly game."

With my 2 favourite sports being football and cricket, today was a big deal for me, with England getting knocked out of the Cricket world cup by Bangladesh and United hosting Arsenal in the FA Cup quarter final. I did have a brief Australian based foray into rugby league but that is for another time. Also the United game hasn't started at the time of writing so I thought I better write whilst I was at least half optimistic the day won't turn out terrible.

Anyway, I expressed my disappointment at being knocked out of the world cup on social media along with many other folk who follow England, as well as mentioning it at work. I was quickly confronted by the phrase:

"Why do you care, it's only a silly game?"

Now the issue with this isn't that I'm annoyed people don't like cricket. They are allowed not to like it. I belong to a fairly small group of people in my social group who does enjoy the game, In fact, if you can understand the game you probably find it boring; it's impenetrability & "oldman-ishness" is part of it's charm.

What I don't like is people taking something I like and reducing it to being "silly". It's only silly  because you don't like it. There are 90,000 people at the MCG on Boxing Day who don't think it is silly. What people mean when they say it's "silly" is actually "I don't understand or like this activity, but it appears to provoke some sort of emotion in you, how odd".

Everyone has different interests and pastimes that make them happy, frustrated or out of pocket. That is what makes being a human so good. There really are thousands of things to wile away your precious time.

The thing is, every activity that is not related to acquiring food, sex or shelter is inherently pointless, it's up to us as humans to find stuff we enjoy. Yes cricket is essentially pointless but then so is everything else.

 Therefore, I enquired into what the particular interests were of the person who uttered the phrase.

Formula 1, wine drinking and Amateur Dramatics. Now, I don't go in for any of these activities and I could write an essay on what I don't like about Formula 1, but I don't think any of those activities are "silly" even though all of them are pointless.

So, let me enjoy my pointless activity and I'll let you enjoy yours.