Always A Battle

I often think about the way we word certain very common things. One of the last things I find very interesting about a daily newspaper is the obituaries, and how they chose to say the central thing: that the person has died. There are a lot of creative ways that they go with, virtually none of which are terribly direct or honest. It's all "passed on" and "went to be with the Lord". I certainly respect those beliefs, at least in as much as I personally hope to enjoy life after death, but I also value directness.

When death comes by means of some long, lingering illness, how is it that we put that? Almost without fail, we say that a person who has died in that manner was in some way "battling" whatever it was. Let's say it's cancer. I don't mean to dishonor the dead or infirm, but is it always a battle? How do you battle an unchecked sub-division of cells? You get treatment, I suppose. All right, I'll grant that it's always a battle. We have a battling spirit, we humans.

No Place For The Weak

Different things motivate me to write. Sometimes it's desperation. Sometimes it's something interesting. Other times it's something that makes me angry. It's perhaps no surprise that I'm partly of French extraction because the more trivial the thing is, the angrier it has the potential to make me. Today is one of those day's where it's something of moderate seriousness at most, and so I'm fairly angry. I read this thing where someone earnestly proclaimed that theirs was a "family blog". Hide the sharp objects from me.

First of all, I think it's worth questioning the assumption that anything designated for the family must be sanitized and made inoffensive. I don't know what families the people who say this stuff come into contact with, but the families that I've been around in life are not thrown by some cursing and references to sex and violence. The flip side of that is that not every single person clamors for the vulgar and explicit. The selection of the family unit as the distinction is, in short, terribly fallible.

The Curse Of Cussing

While I do my best when it comes to speaking the English language in a grammatically correct fashion, I'm no saint when it comes to the implementation of those infamous Anglo-Saxon words of such objection. I hasten to note that I don't swear as much as some. Nonetheless, I find that those words are an inextricable part of my vocabulary and speech. That being the case, I have a powerful curiosity about their use.

You might think that I would start delving into the history of foul language, given my great interest in history. Interestingly enough, I find that I have no real interest in the origins of four letter words or the evolution in their use. Their utility is something I think about considerably more. People just cannot seem to do without them, and that's actually a shame when you think about how much more fun common substitutes can be. To say "Shut the front door" or "Doggone it" shows as much creativity as it does sensitivity.