I use Google Alerts for a variety of key-words, mainly to keep me up-to-date on topics like video game blogs. I have one setup for “button mashing” and every so often I get an alert, pointing me to another review of a game involving copious amounts of button mashing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But I got one recently that made me laugh. Behold, the buttonbash. Buttonbash?
This doesn’t seem right. In my mind, “bash” is something you do with say, a baseball bat. And you bash something bashable, say someone’s head. At least that’s what I learned playing GTA:SA. I even have a new cranial menu called “bash head with aluminum bat.” It comes in handy.
On the otherhand, “mash” is something you do to potatoes. Or grapes. Mashing can be a good thing. It’s doesn’t exude the violent intonations “bash” does.
In fact, wonderful things come from mashing. Mashed potatoes come immediately to mind. I don’t think too many people would find “Bashed Potatoes” very appetizing. Mashed potatoes, with a pat of butter and some freshly cracked pepper? That’s what I’m talking about.
It appears that our fellow gamers across the pond bash buttons. That’s a shame. It seems so brutish and unsophisticated. We only mash buttons here. So eloquent and refined. We don’t feel overt aggression towards our buttons. We mash them into something wonderful.
And no, “mashing” buttons isn’t a crime. For some of us, it’s all we have.
You know, I’ve never heard the term “button bash” before, and I lived there for six years. Perhaps I was hanging round uncool people.
Well, in the case of Taiko Drum Master I guess a term like “button bash” would make sense. That’s only if you consider the drum to be a button, though.
Mash:
1. A fermentable starchy mixture from which alcohol or spirits
can be distilled.
2. A mixture of ground grain and nutrients fed to livestock
and fowl.
3. A soft pulpy mixture or mass.
4. A crushing or grinding.
5. Slang. An infatuation or act of flirtation.
Bash:
1. To strike with a heavy, crushing blow: The thug bashed the hood of the car with a sledgehammer.
2. To beat or assault severely: The police arrested the men who bashed an immigrant in the park.
3. Informal. To criticize (another) harshly, accusatorially, and threateningly: “He bashed the… government unmercifully over the… spy affair” (Lally Weymouth).
I report, you decide. Personally I think we are all nuts!