Verbal Difficulties: 110%

The world is changing. Sea levels are rising while financial empires fall. Earthquakes roar and all we seem to be worried about is Lady Gaga’s latest outfit. How much of her midriff is on show? Did you hear about it on Twitter? The mind boggles. And that’s not the end of it...
Numbers are changing too. Not too long ago, Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap marvelled at amplifiers ‘that go up to eleven’. Apparently, as most amps would only go to ten, it was important to take that extra step, to reach beyond the norm. After all, ‘it's one louder, isn't it?’
And it seems in our globalised, gossip-ridden, retweeted world, going that extra step is the most important thing. To get anywhere in the music business these days, you are subjected to public exploitation on a show like X-Factor or Ídolos, its Portuguese equivalent. After the deliciously cruel and gruelling auditions where hundreds of desperate hopefuls are held up for ridicule, the few of them granted a place in the next stage of the programme earnestly promise to give their captors ‘110 percent.’
110 percent? What is that? If you look at it mathematically, it’s more than the whole. Those hundred-and-ten-percenters promise to do everything the next guy or gal can and more. Not only will they sing you a song, but they’ll play it to you on a guitar carved from a rare redwood that they felled with a single karate chop. And who cares about protected species? These guys would harpoon dolphins to get a place in the next round of the show.
The worst are the contestants of American Idol: bulging, scary-eyed fanatics desperate for their fifteen minutes. In typical American style, these ardent hundred-and-tenners come and sing random acapellas all over the metric system. Why not reinvent whole numbers? They’ve been using the imperial system for years which is a about as useful as the judging panel of the show. Join the yankee hundred-and-tenners and share that same wanton abandon that presumes you can march on any stage and spontaneously start singing a dodgy version of Beyonce with bottom-shaking dance moves to match.
And what do those wobbles tell you? If you give 110 percent, you’ll never regret it.
Or will you? Should we really have to flog ourselves in public for the pleasure of others to fulfil our dreams? If it’s fame you want, well maybe you do. After all, the audiences you are subjecting yourself to are the very people you are seeking to win over. But what worries me is how keen people are to make fools of themselves, the implication being that the only way to be happy is to be exceptionally shameless.
And what about us regular, down-to-earth hundred-percenters? The normal, run-of-the-mill, finish-what-you-started people like you and me- where does that leave us? The trouble with all this superlative effort is that it encourages us to worship extremes. It makes you think that being normal isn’t okay, that if you’re not suffering from bulging muscles or extreme anorexia somehow you don’t fit in. Monstrous obesity is fine as long as you’re on a diet or a reality TV show.
Yet all these extremes are used to grab our attention by television programming that just isn’t representing a healthy majority of adjusted people. What happened to all those other contestants who sang well enough but didn’t make it past the first round of the show or weren’t freaky enough to be featured anyway? And what about the rest of us at home? A lot of people don’t want to be famous, and everyone should know that’s it’s alright to just be yourself.
And if that doesn’t convince you, think of a world run by these tree-chopping, dolphin-murdering fanatical idiots, wobbling and crooning on every street corner, each one clamouring for your attention like buskers with a messiah complex.
You’d hardly get anything done.