Society - Ann Coulter, Again

Well, this jerk just loves to get attention for herself, no matter how. Little Whore-bag Annie made the headlines yet again by making stupid and offensive comments, this time at the Conservative Political Action Conference. To wit, “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”

Her reference was to Grey's Anatomy star, Isaiah Washington, who called one of his co-stars a faggot and subsequently checked into rehab after a public outcry by the gay community. I have to admit, the whole checking into rehab thing is absolutely ridiculous, but it's unfortunate that a cunt like Ann Coulter has to be the only one who brings attention to the zeitgeist of such an exagerrated form of mea culpa.

If I were a fag, I'd probably be offended too by the typical uses of the word. Therefore, it's only with compassion, empathy, respect and common sense that I don't throw the word around like I did in high school. But, that said, I do have pleasant memories of the recent past, when Bill and Ted (remember them?) could hug each other, suddenly push apart, and say, "Fag." The joke was more on them than on gays.

But, alas, such days of free speech are long past. Marketing basically dictates what public performance can and cannot say. And Annie, being the dinosaur that she is, can't help but make an ass of herself. Though, one has to admit, being an ass is exactly what sells her books and makes her a saught after public speaker. She obviously knows what she's doing, at least economically.

But one day, Annie's going to develope a cancer or something. She'll wither away into a semblance of the whining liberals that she disdains so much. And more than likely, nobody will give a rat's ass. So, while she may fill her bank account by acting like an insensitive bitch, in the long run she is, and will be, poorer than the schizophrenic nut on the corner who shouts "Jew!" and "Nigger!" at passing cars. To hell with her.

Language - Did I Just Say That Out Loud?

There are words or expressions for just about everything in the human experience. The beauty of English is that if we haven't got it, we steal it from another language and make it our own. That's one reason why English is considered the most precise language in existence. Some examples:

• NULLIBIST n. One who denies the existence of the soul in space.
• PROSOPOPEIA n. A rhetorical introduction of an imagined speaker. "If this bed could talk ..."
• DISCISSION n. Sticking a needle in the eye.
• DEFENESTRATE v. To throw a person through a window.
• HORRESCO REFERENS n. Exhibiting horror from a memory.
• OMPHALOSKEPSIS n. Contemplation of one's navel.
  
• GYNOTIKOLOBOMASSOPHILE n. Someone who likes to nibble on a woman's earlobe.
  

But there is one sensation that I have never been able to find a word for:

That embarrassed feeling one has when uncertain if they have just spoken a thought out loud, usually while deep in thought in a public space.

I once thought that it was something unique to me, just a quirk of personality, or a side-effect from past experimentation with LSD. But I've discovered through various conversations that it's a feeling quite common among people. Yet, nobody has a word for it.

Over the years, when the curiosity has returned from a long absence, I've sent the occasional email to a language expert, searched reverse dictionaries, and when all that failed, I even tried to construct it from word stems. Here are some of my efforts:

• proloquor dubium
• erubescundus in oratorius ambiguito
• verecundor in quam oratorio
• andabatic excogitation
• uncertain mental encopresis
• deja logorrhea malnoia
• possible schizophrenia
• fucking nuts

I'll say right off the bat that my Latin sucks. Probably the grammatical constructions above are way off. Still, I like the sound of proloquor dubium. Andabatic excogitation is okay as well. But uncertain mental encopresis has an expressive quality that endears. Encopresis means, "unintentional defecation." Nice.

I'd like to make this post a call to arms for any wordsmiths or etymologists out there who might take a jab at this. Does the concept I'm describing already exist in speech? Is there a better way of describing it than what I've attempted above? By all means, please share. Let's make history together. If Dan Savage can create a neoligism for santorum, we can fill an equally important gap in the language. Make it happen, cap'ns.

Language - What’s Wrong With "Fuck"?

In the presence of my toddler recently, I let fly the phrase, “That’s fucked up.” And of course it became a new addition to his rapidly expanding toolbox of expression. What was remarkable to me about the episode is that, once confronted with it, I really didn’t care if he spoke that way or not. Another way of putting it, of course, is: I really didn’t give a fuck. And I couldn’t help but wonder if there is something wrong with my attitude.

A friend of mine lowers his voice on the phone when uttering the word as an intensifier, as if he were telling me about some whore he screwed in Utah while his wife’s in the background wiping oatmeal off his kid’s cheeks. It’s such an evil word for a child to be exposed to. Apparently. Yet, aside from the fact that everybody else thinks so, I don’t see why. As I expressed to my child’s mother, if eventually he can distinguish between situations in which it’s acceptable or not, what’s the big deal?

It’s a word, nothing more. A labiodental fricative and a velar plosive, separated by a monophthong. So what? Fff, uh, kk. Three sounds that, in any other combination, are harmless. Twenty years ago I read –in some unremembered source—that what anglophones consider vulgar or not is actually descended from an ancient form of ethnocentricity. For a few centuries after William the Conqueror, the language of the English court was French. So all words deriving from French, such as fornicate, penis, or vagina were considered acceptable. Fuck, cock and cunt, however are Anglo-Saxon, deriving from the Germanic origins of the language and were therefore considered vulgar. Vulgar, by the way, originally meant “common” and only later came to include the definition of “in bad taste”

Its power lies not so much in its presence but in the intention behind it. Once, in high school, a teacher ripped my Sony Walkman out of my hands in the hallway and took it into his classroom. Feeling a sense of injustice had been committed, I followed him into his class and, in front of his remedial reading group, demanded the return of my property. Persuant to my understanding of the regulations, walkmen were prohibited in class, but not in the hallway. When I refused to leave without my device, he wrote me up for detention. Then, very slowly, I tore the detention slip in two and dropped it on his desk, saying, “You can go fuck yourself.”

The strength in the statement lay not in the literal meaning of the phrase, though it would have been amusing to see him try. What rankled him and his administrative overlords more was the absolute destruction of that pedestal of respect that authority depends on. Not only did I refuse to acknowledge the sancity of his quarters, nor give importance to his imposition of d-hall, but with one fell swoop I tore down the barrier of propriety that divides students and teachers and said, essentially, You are not important enough for me to observe the rules of language. For some reason, that was worse than any of my other “offenses,” and it begat a series of parental meetings ultimately resulting in my suspension from school.

I’d like to think that words like “fuck” and “nigger” will eventually become disempowered along with all their cronies, that they will become like a rubber knife that will only be laughed at if used seriously. But given the self-importance of both the puritanical and politically correct, it seems that day is a long way away, even if, due to overusage, the word is far less powerful than when Holden Caufield freely commented on it in 1951. Indeed, the television show Deadwood is fighting the good fight by defusing the word through overusage, as can be measured in The Deadwood Fuck Count. I look forward to the day when politicos speak as freely as the characters on HBO. “That miserable fuckwit thinks he can run this country better than I, and god help every one of you cocksuckers if he wins this fucking election.” I wonder how many more votes Kerry would have won if I had been his speechwriter.

I suppose that –in the spirit of “If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not”—I will continue to be amused at the sporadic “fuck” that my baby utters, knowing that it offends sensibilities that I neither share nor approve of. As he goes through life, I’ll do my best to instill an idea of pertinence and moderation, along with respect for individuals. But if, on the odd occasion, he looks up at me and says, “Papa, that Blues Clues is one fucking good show!” I’ll just smile and scratch his head. “That’s my boy.”