fishing trip with a
Mormon. What's the best way to keep the Mormon from stealing
your beer?
Answer: Take two Mormons.
| Neologistics→ Writing → Speech |
Children are impressionable. They pick up what they hear.
On my favorite running list I told a story about something I did when I was six years old. I no longer recall what it had to do with running.
One summer day (about 1949) I was cruising the block on our dead-end street, where there were no sidewalks. Some cement workers were laying a front walk two or three houses down the street. When I got too close to the wet cement, one of the workers growled at me: "Get the hell out of our way, kid!"
Woo! I'd never heard that expression before, but I perceived immediately that it was intended to add emphasis to his imperative, and effectively so. I jumped and ran off.
Fifteen minutes later I arrived home, entering via the side door, and through the kitchen where my mother was working. As I strode through, I said to her: "Get the hell out of my way!" To my disappointment, my use of the phrase had a somewhat different effect than when the workmen used it. I think my bottom ached for a week, and I was afraid to utter any sort of naughty word ever again, not even once, until I was in eighth grade. Eventually I made clean speech a matter of deliberate choice. Today I eschew all such talk, as the argot of morons.
A subscriber to that running list, a man from Ireland, replied, "Well, 'hell' hardly qualifies as a naughty word these days." I replied, "Yeah, but you're Irish. Enough said."
He asked "What qualified in your eighth grade?" I replied, "Hell qualified. But my debut in iniquity was sparked by a 'damn'. If you think 'damn' wasn't strong stuff in 1956, you haven't seen Back to the Future. And you've lived in Ireland too long."
There are those who whine about their right of free speech, claiming they should be permitted to say whatever they want. Excuse me, but did I say anything to suggest they should not, or that I favor censorship? The opposite is true.
I'm in favor of freedom of speech, and despise censorship other than self-censorship. In being permitted to express exactly what is in their hearts, people provide the service of revealing to us the sort of persons we are dealing with. I'd much rather hear the hateful racist rantings of a skinhead than live next door to such a person and be blinded into believing he is an upright, wholesome citizen and good neighbor, while the truth lies buried beneath a veil of hypocrisy.
I've often heard people talk of their right to use what they label as "colorful speech". They are indeed entitled to that right in this part of the world. But "colorful"? I think not. Perhaps it is so to people whose palette is limited to the hues of urine, feces, semen, and blood.
If someone wants to use retreaded colorful speech, then let him quote James Joyce, not the drivel of an ignorant, tattooed, drunken dock worker, eight pints down the hatch, lying on a barroom floor in his own vomit.
Personally, I find gratuitous vulgarity embarrassing. People laugh at it, not because it's funny, but as a defense mechanism, a release valve for discomfort.
Have you ever noticed how readily Chinese people laugh? Say something to a Chinaman and he laughs: Ha ha! Not because what you've said is actually funny, but because he comes from a place that is culturally so dissimilar to ours. When speaking to Westerners he is in unfamiliar territory. Rather than manifesting fear, nervousness, hostility, or some such negative emotion, he laughs spontaneously, almost without apparent reason. Ha ha!
Today many so-called comedians are seemingly entirely lacking in funny things to say. Take a simple joke:
Question: You're going on a fishing trip with a Mormon. What's the best way to keep the Mormon from stealing your beer?Answer: Take two Mormons.
Now that's funny! What if it's told this way:
Question: You're going on aAnswer: Take two
Was it any funnier that way? No. All the bleeps are inserted expletives that add nothing whatever to the base material.
Here's another example:
Two Eskimos, sitting in a kayak, were very chilly. To keep warm, they lit a fire in the craft, but it sank. They should have known. You can't have your kayak and heat it too.
Funny? It's a groaner, unless you're starved for humor. How about this way?
Two
A stand-up comic could take that version to a night club and some in the audience would laugh at it and then order another drink. Why? Because they are laughing at the vulgarity; they are laughing because of shock, to relieve the embarrassment — added to the embarrassment of having paid good money to be there and endure the abuse.
— February, 2002