The Scariest of Them All

A friend in the U.K. sent me an interesting bit of trivia from a TV show in that country.  This is how it goes:  Contestants were shown five anagrams of five capital cities and asked to name the cities.  There was MAIL and QUOIT and LOUSE and SOLO and then there was SCARIEST.

Would you believe viewers were able to solve all save the scariest one, which remained unsolved at the end of the show. What about you?  Can you help them out?  Will you venture to voice the answer?

Haven’t found it yet? Surely it’s a no-brainer in these days of our lives. You have to be hearing it a whole lot these days, not so? The word “scary,” I mean.  It seems to be on the lips of so many people, and for a whole lot of really scary reasons too. All that crime: scary; the wanton arrogance: scary; the clumsy cluelessness: scary. The level of dishonesty: scary. The white-collar criminality: scary. The ineptitude: scary. The already disenchanted party front-liners: scary. The diatribes: scary. The infighting: scary. The Squeak’s speeches: scary.

The hasty ascension of the aggressive strongman, he who would rule Helen: Very scary. The withdrawal of the election poulbwa to their deafeningly silent holes where they live to feed on you another self-serving day: scary. The rank, abundant hypocrisy of the governing party and its minions: some would say Scariest even than all the rest.

But wait! Now we learn the “scariest of them all?”  In this branch of the adjectival family such as bad-worse-worst, we do not simply fall in the positive or the comparative group but right up there in the superlative category. In other words, the very best of the worst—which really adds up to the absolute worst!

Not fair, you say?  How could Le Marquis Charles Eugene de la Croix de Castries have named her so?  Did he possibly imagine her to be as grand as he was?  Could be.  But, no matter what the reason, you have to admire his most precise prescience.  Two hundred and sixty-six years later, and he is being proved to be spot on!  So, doesn’t that really explain it all?  Surely, now we understand: we jus’ can’t help it.  We were baptised as such.  It’s pretty much in our DNA, you would say. No?  Man, we jus’ living up to our name, of course.  It eh our fault at all, at all, uh. Blighted from the start, in other words!

Now that the secret’s out, others of us who don’t like it one little bit, wonder for instance, how our tourists might react to this newfound knowledge.  What’s in a name, they may at first declare. But when confronted with word of the current state of play in our country in these unenlightened times, and the obvious fact that there are those who seem bent in every which way on living up to our TV name, and more so, that this all starts from the conduct of those who call the shots, it could give them pause.  However, to return to my British friend, with whom I began, he had no problem in immediately spotting the capital city.  That particularly troublesome TV show question was a breeze for him.  After all, he knows; he visits every year.

Finally, what rotten luck eh, even if merely lexically speaking, to have been so showcased to hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of viewers of that popular show.   But, I ask you, how were the poor (rich) producers to know they were opening a whole can of worms there. That many a true word is spoken in jest!