“I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about Jeter.” Just kidding. The game we love, the players we hate, and more.
From Norman Mailer to Wendy Pepper — everything on film, TV, books, music, and snacks (shut up, raisins), plus the Girls’ Bike Club.
Helping public schools, winning prizes, sending a crazy lady in a tomato costume out in public.
Monologues, travelogues, fiction, and fart humor. And hens. Don’t forget the hens.
The Tomato Nation advice column addresses your questions on etiquette, grammar, romance, and pet misbehavior. Ask The Readers about books or fashion today!
Steven Pinker on why we curse.
And following a link from PCJM to an exhaustive Halloween-candy review, I found on the same site “The ‘I Don’t Like It’ List,” which had me rolling. “DaaaaAAAAAAAAAVE!”
I’ve (re-)discovered a few things over the course of the recent Days Of Rage. Some of them are great!
I found it while researching a murder (…this is a sentence I have more frequent use for than most), the true story of a neighborhood legend from my childhood. I grew up in a leafy, …
I loved the Pinker, mostly because it made me laugh innaproriately.
But this was genius and a revelation:
“When Norman Mailer wrote his true-to-life novel about World War II, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, his compromise with the sensibilities of the day was to have soldiers use the pseudo-epithet fug. (When Dorothy Parker met him, she said, “So you’re the man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck.”)”
HORF! SNERK. “Grab-ass meter maids…” Hee. I hurt myself, I think.
In the face.
This essay reminds me of a lengthy post I saw on USEnet, back in the day, expounding on the British using “cunt” as a pejorative term, and how it showed that the British were in general more aggressively manly than Americans and therefore calling someone a piece of female anatomy was a much more dire insult than an American calling someone a “girly-man”.
The replies were pretty uniformly “shut it ye pretentious twat”.
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What bugs me the most about the whole swear-words debate is that the swearers always want to have it both ways. They’re choosing the words because they like the emotional shock effect…but then they argue that people attach too much emotional value to words. If people shouldn’t get upset about words, then why do you use particular words?
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Also, there’s the issue of expected level of content in a shared situation. Maybe I’m in a place where I don’t want to hear coarse language–and I’ve intentionally chosen to be in that place. Would you like to see a morbidly obese man with no pants on while you’re eating dinner? If not, why not? It’s just a human body, we all have them, what’s your problem with human bodies after all, why should my freedom be infringed by your wierd sexual hang-ups?
Same kind of thing with language. Of course, the problem is that everyone has a different idea of what “expected” content means. But it’s important to recognize that very fact. When someone gets upset at you because you were screaming “fuck you you fucking fuck-fuck!” at the laundromat, you could say “gosh, I’m sorry, I’ll try to tone it down.” You could say “fuck you, I don’t care what you think.” But it’s not really appropriate to say “you _shouldn’t_ be upset”, because how can you direct someone to not feel a particular emotion?
DensityDuck, that was awesome, and utterly undeniable. Kudos.
Density Duck, and Sars for the link, between you, you’ve made me think more about this topic than I probably ever have in my life. And that is a gift indeed.
My current conclusion is that it’s therefore, not the mere words the censors want to control, it’s the gut reaction of emotion (anger, passion, shock, contempt, etc) that swear words evoke, all of which are not conducive to running a state full of God fearin’, law abidin’ taxpaying citizens who keep their heads down, do what they’re told and trustingly accept euphemisms like “collateral damage” etc.
And this is postdated right back to the dawn of time, and applies to all cultures and nations.
So while I wholeheartedly agree that “it’s not really appropriate to say ‘you _shouldn’t_ be upset’, because how can you direct someone to not feel a particular emotion?” perhaps the scariest – indeed, most offensive – act of all is to try to pretend that the emotions that precede and cause swearing need to be silenced and removed from the human experience.
Oh man. “Kate Mulgrew in Star Trek Voyager.” I’ll second THAT emotion. That voice of hers was like nails on a blackboard.
That’s actually an excerpt from Pinker’s latest book, The Stuff of Thought. He basically argues that the way we think shapes the way we talk. I highly recommend it to any budding linguistic nerd!
The Pinker article reminds me of two experiences in my life as an English major. The first is a rhetoric class I took. We spent some time on the power of words, and when the words cunt and nigger came up, nobody would say them. Even though we were a group of educated adults who were using these words to analyze their effects on people–not to wield them as insults–no one wanted to be the one to actually speak them aloud in class.
The second experience was at a faculty party. The chair of the department was a man who had an air about him that just commanded respect. He had a presence such that, even after I started working for the department, I couldn’t bring myself to refer to him by his first name; he was always *Dr.* So-And-So to me. Anyway, the conversation turned to uses of language (because that’s what English professors do when they party), and someone mentioned that *fucking* is the only infix in the English language. Well, it’s not a true infix, as it doesn’t change the meaning or part of speech of a word, but it is the only word that you can insert into another word. Then they tried to write the rules for using fucking as an infix–why is it acceptable in some words but not others? And there was Dr. So-And-So, sipping his coffee, and wondering aloud why Missi-fucking-ssippi is acceptable but Michi-fucking-gan is not. Once again, it made me appreciate a field of study in which people can debate the many uses and parts of speech of the word fuck in all seriousness.
(Incidentally, I think the “fucking-as-infix” rules are based on syllable stress. It only sounds right if you put it before a stressed syllable. So, Missi-fucking-SSIppi works, but MIchi-fucking-gan doesn’t. And I think there should be at least two syllables before the insert. Thus, Ari-fucking-zona sounds okay, but O-fucking-hio doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.)
JenK: as someone who spent 8 miserable months in O-fucking-hio, I have to say it has a very fitting ring to me…
I love that this shit can be talked about in such an intellectual way. This blog is fucking awesome.
The “I Don’t Like It” list had me laughing so hard that I cried off all my mascara and made my cube-mate concerned for my safety. My possible favorite thing about this list? The fact that Hitler clocks in around #76, but not before “Pants fulla monkeys” and “That 7-11 burrito at 2 AM that one time in 1987”.
I think I’m just gonna start adding “In the face” to everything I say. Instant comedy!
I’ll put this here, since there’s the slightest mention of baseball-adjacent things: Joe Girardi for Yankee manager. Any thoughts, Sars?
@ JenK: I could swear that when I took linguistics in college (approximately a hundred years ago), we called this the Fucking Insertion Principle, which while not itself an actual thing was – I thought – based on an actual linguistics concept involving the words “insertion” and “principle.” Google’s not helping me out with anything I can actually understand, though, so I could be making this up. But you’re basically right. Using linguistics, it’s possible to describe where it is and isn’t okay to stick “fucking” in the middle of a word. I don’t remember the exact rules anymore, but it does have something to do with syllable stress, as well as maybe the actual sounds in the syllables.
Pinker doesn’t mention it in his article, but I remember years ago being told that one reason words like fuck and shit and cunt fell out of favor in the first place (and were replaced Latin cognates) was because they were from the vernacular and thus considered rustic and uneducated. I can’t remember where I learned that now, and google is once again letting me down, so I’m not sure whether this is also something I’ve made up…
@bristlesage: Don’t worry, I’ll get to it. Short verzh: I’m in favor.
@Danielle: I know! It starts out kind of standard, and then suddenly it’s hilarious. That guy’s other pieces are good too.