Why I gotta be such a potty-mouth?
A few updates ago I used a pretty “foul” word several times. I did this advisedly, unlike most other Interweb denizens for whom such speech is punctuation, because (a) everybody that I care might ever read this blog is already familiar with most swears, and (b) it was funny.
Look, Society in General Reduced to an Anthropomorphic Strawman for the Purpose of This Argument, I’m not comfortable with the idea that some words are forbidden because they’re offensive to people of delicate character. It smacks of some sort of 18th Century class division, where the aristocrats separate themselves from the commoners by initiating arbitrary rules and then gasp and flutter their fans when someone unwittingly breaks them. It’s clubhouse mentality, secret handshake mentality, “look at his pants how could anyone wear Chinos in November” mentality.
This is almost certainly why the “commoners” in the Swear Wars, the swearers themselves, tend to take up the flag and run far and long in the other direction. They reject polite society because polite society tends to act like a bunch of prigs. Fine if you’re a prig, I guess, but seriously you’re not going to be invited to a lot of parties with that attitude.
I know from experience. I was one of those prigs in my youth. “Wouldn’t say ‘Sh-’ with his mouth full,” as a friend of mine used to say. But eventually the bloom was off the rose and I realized that my pipe-dream of an egalitarian world didn’t allow people separating themselves by any metric, even the daintiness of their language. So I eschewed it. I still don’t make sailors blush, but they act slightly abashed, even coy, in my presence, so good enough.
So in conclusion, poo poo pee pee. Guess I can’t come into your treehouse now. Somehow I’ll survive.