What the %#$?! did you say?

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

— Mark Twain

Tim’s taking flak for swearing. I read Tim's piece without really noticing: it wasn't the first time I'd seen that word in print and it's not the sort of thing over which I'm inclined to take offense.

That got me wondering about my own use of “the F word”. I speak it plenty, but I tend not to write it. I type “f” “u” “c”…and I think, “nah, think of something clever instead”. But I feel differently about the written word and the spoken word so I don't ascribe any significance to that.

Still, I know I've used the word, so I went searching for it. It occurs only twice in essays: once in an essay about the Bush administration and once in an essay about whitespace. I find that strangely satisfying.

Comments:

several...

- same feeling here in how written and spoken word are different
- nice cookie checkbox (feels so web1.0 in the best possible way)
- you did not specify bg-color of webpage. it is just default which in my case is not white

Posted by Christopher on 25 Oct 2006 @ 12:01pm UTC #
Add a comment or subscribe to (existing and future) comments on this essay.
Name:
Email*:
 *Please provide your real email address; it will not be displayed as part of the comment.
Homepage:
Comment**:
 **The following markup may be used in the body of the comment: a, abbr, b, br, code, em, i, p, pre, strong, and var. You can also use character entities. Any other markup will be discarded, including all attributes (except href on a). Your tag soup will be sanitized...