The Online Photographer

Reacting to the "Ode to Old Lenses" post below, I got this comment:

John Bour [lightly edited]: "OK, sorry Mike, only a few sentences in, and this triggered me to react (will read the undoubtedly interesting rest of your post after getting this off my chest). What is it with you Americans that you feel compelled to replace a word like s--t with 'stuff' or sh*t? We are adults; no kids read this blog, and if they do their souls will not be spoiled by reading s--t (or 'the f-word, the n-word [see below —Ed.] etc). Grow up (not you personally, but the US as a nation). So much s--tty stuff going on in your country and the world in general, but oy oy...we can not expose our adult readership to s--t like s--t. We and our kids can consume a s--tload of violence on TV, porn on the web....

"Who are you trying to protect with this prudishness, and from what? Any bigot who is offended by seeing the word s--t instead of sh*t is not worth protecting!

"S--t, sorry, I got carried away. Longtime follower of your blog, daily visitor. European, so that might explain my irritation. Keep up the good work! Back to reading your post.  ;-)  John."

Mike replies: Sorry back, but it amused me to edit the sh*t out of your complaint. Literally. No offense!  :-)

Our no profanity proscription is because, at least in early days, it was rumored that institutions such as schools had filters in place to disallow sites with profanity from being accessed. I never even knew for sure if that was true, but it made sense, so I opted to err on the side of caution. Besides, if one almost never uses profanity, it increases the impact when one does. But in general, I'm not a fan. The overuse of profanity is "the inarticulate mind attempting to express itself forcefully."

I've been a big believer in politeness from early on. My father had a pushbutton rant against politeness; he would say, bitterly, "politeness is so fake," and elaborate accordingly. I guess he considered it an authenticity issue: "People should say what they really think," and "politeness is just a bunch of lies," and so forth. I was maybe 13 when I first engaged with that argument: my position was, of course it's fake. That's its purpose. If everyone went around saying what they really think all the time, we'd create a whole society with a sludgey, sticky coating of slouching, snarling insult all over everything. We'd all go about the world in little bubbles of self-aggrandizing narcissism, dismissing and degrading others. And being battered willy-nilly by the slings and arrows of others, as they ran roughshod over our own feelings in return. Human beings are self-centered and prejudiced by nature. Politeness is the custom of keeping social order by encouraging people not to give vent to the foul spewing dyspepsia in their hearts all the time and at every turn. It's not just useful. It's essential.

Avoiding profanity is classic "middlebrow" politeness behavior. See Chapter 5, "Middlebrow Culture from Noon to Twilight," in Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies.

Mary, on a Summer's day
Two little data points. My father was notably misogynistic, and had a special animus toward women who he thought talked too much, because his mother, my paternal grandmother, had that characteristic, or so he said. My same-age cousin Chris and I both have loyal and loving memories of Gran, and neither of us remember that. But then, we were six when she died. And we probably listened. According to my father, when Gran would call, he would set the receiver down and go do something else, and she would talk on without him. My mother said that wasn't true, but if it wasn't, my father liked to say it was.

Anyway, when my father took a governmental position and we moved to Washington D.C. in the 1970s, we had a very friendly neighbor across the street named Mary. I wouldn't say Mary was pathological about it (it's called logorrhea in its extreme form), but she, too, could sparkle with streams of rapid skittering talk when she wanted to. She was light and kind, with a breeziness that covered an underlayment of anxiousness and emotional fragility. Another delightful but maybe somewhat ditzy thing about Mary was that she and her husband had been posted in Britain for seven years, and she had come home with a permanent British accent. She just liked it. My father, who I'm sure only socialized with these neighbors under duress, had some pent-up opinions about this that we heard about once or twice at home. He thought she was "putting on airs" as the descendants of hillbillies would put it. My father put on airs himself, but with French. He would use certain French words as replacements for the English ones even though he had never made much headway in his long-term quest to learn to speak French.

One fine Summer's day Mary came across the street to tell us she had accepted a package for us or some such, some little neighborly thing, and she ended up exchanging words with my father, who spoke down to her through an upstairs window. The conversation somehow turned that way, so he took the occasion to unload on her everything on his mind where she was concerned. He told her she talked too g*ddamn much, that nobody liked her on account of it (not true; only true of him), that everybody thought so and said so behind her back (also not true), et cetera. From there it would have been only a short segue to his acidic opinions of her accent, I'm sure. Apparently he calmly went on in this vein for some time, "letting her have it" as he would put it. Well, poor Mary, who had only been being friendly, was so upset at all this that she went home, vomited several times, and then cried for the rest of the afternoon. Finally her husband Jack came home from work and could comfort her. Jack, who was British but had learned an American accent for his job as a supermarket executive, was a courtly, white-haired, well-regulated gentleman, genial and even-tempered to all, but he was livid about this casually cruel treatment of his wife, or as livid as he ever got anyway (though not so angry as to swear I'm sure). It was probably a good thing for neighborhood harmony that when Jack marched over to protest, my father was no longer home, and my mother was able to soothe him.

What had been needed there was a dash of politeness, if you please. A soupçon of consideration for the feelings of others. But no, that would have been "fake."

The hungry shark
The second thing John Bour's comment about sh*t brought to mind is a couple of jokes I heard in Ireland when I was there for the only time in my life. Long story, but when I was about twenty I had to use a plane ticket to Ireland because I couldn't get a refund for it. I liked Ireland so much when I was there it made me think about going there to live; I would dearly love to go there again before I die. I was still drinking at the time, so I spent a lot of time in pubs sucking down dark brown stout. Right off the plane at Shannon I sat next to an Irishman who told me a joke. Seems there was an English ship that went down off the coast of the Republic. The Irish sharks each got their own sailor on whom to feast except one. When the others were consoling him for going hungry, they asked him why he didn't get a sailor for himself. He said he came across one all right, but it was a bare-chested drowned sailor who had a big tattoo across his chest. "The tattoo said 'BRITANNIA RULES THE WAVES,' said the mournful Irish shark, 'and I couldn't very well swallow that sh*t, now, could I?'"

From that, I learned to ask my fellow imbibers in pubs whether they knew any jokes. Of course they all did. I heard some epic Irish jokes on that trip as a result, some of which took twenty minutes to tell, some of which were embroidered and enameled from a great many rehearsals, and some of which I remember to this day. What follows was the one I liked the most. I'll do my best to reproduce it, but the young man who told it to me had told it many times and was nicely practiced, and of course he knew all the proper Irishisms and had the tones of voice down pat. You'll have to excuse my written imitation as pale by comparison.

Seems Paddy came home from work one afternoon to find his wife Bridy in a terrible state. Dirty, clothes ripped and torn, with bruises on her arms and a cold beefsteak pressed against a black eye. This made Paddy fly into a rage. Brandishing his fists, he demanded to know where she had been. "I had a doctor's appointment today with that young doctor down the lane—Tim O'Leary, Conor and Keira O'Leary's boy," she moaned, at which Paddy cried, "He did this to ye, did he, that Tim? Say that and I'll go give him what for! I'll kill him with my hands, I swear I shall!" But Bridy said, "No, no, Tim didn't lay a hand on me he shouldn't have, calm yerself down. He was a perfect gentleman. Don't fly off the handle, Paddy, till you hear my whole story!"

"Tim and them couldn't have been nicer," she continued, "and my checkup went well, but then he wanted me to pee into a little bottle, you know, like they do? Well, I tried, but I could nae, in such a strange place. So I says, may I go home up the hill to my own house, and fill yer wee bottle there, Doctor Tim, where I can be myself? And he says, all right, Bridy, all right.

"So I came home and did as I said. And as I was heading back down the hill, who should I meet comin' up the hill but that Mairead Corrigan. Well, you know how Mairead and I never got on since we was girls together. And she's always so fake-polite to me on account of it. So I quick whips my little bottle behind my back lest she see it and ask what it is. You know how she pries. But I think maybe I was a split too late, and she's seen me done it.

"An' she says, all sly, 'Why, hello Bridy, how do ye do?' And I says, 'Fine, thank ye, Mairead. And how are you?' And she says, 'Quite well, Bridy, and how is Paddy?' And I says, 'he's fine as ever he is.' And she says, prying, 'And where you be getting off to this fine day?' And I says, 'To the doctor, Mairead, young Tim down the lane,' and she pulls back from me and says, 'Yer sick are ye? And talkin' at my face like that!' and I says, 'No, no, it's a well visit, I'm getting my yearly,' and then she comes out with it. She cocks her head at me sidewise, an' she says, all sweet, 'And what's—that—ye—got—behind—yer—back?'

"And I answers her, a bit too fierce, 'Piss in a bottle!' An' she takes a start, cocks her fists and cries, 'Sh*t in yer hat, you old bitch!' An' the fight was on!"

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Paul Emberger: "Firstly, I don't mind profane language, myself. I don't think it is always used to insult or be crude. Though I do agree with you, Mike, I prefer a polite society over rude. That said, I need to address this portion of John's comment: 'We are adults; no kids read this blog, and if they do their souls will not be spoiled by reading s--t (or 'the f-word, the n-word etc).' Please don't speak so casually about using the 'n' word. As a Europeaner, perhaps you don't have a full grasp of the history of this word. Personally, having grown up in an inner city, and loved many black people, both friends and romantically, in fact my wife is black, I have a strong, negative personal reaction to it, no matter who uses it. But here in the US, it is entirely inappropriate for a white person, honestly anyone except for a black American, to use that word. I would strongly suggest if you ever visit the United States, you never use it. Also, I would implore you to not use it at home in your own country either. It is an awful word with an awful history, that is only used by some black American people now because they have taken the power out of it. It is their right, and their right alone. Anybody else who uses it, is either ignorant of this or is just ignorant themselves."

John Bour replies (partial comment; see his entire reply in the Comments Section): "I sincerely apologise for mentioning the 'n-word' as an example of silly prudeness. I am fully aware of the connotations, and the offensiveness to the African American community. It is in another league than harmless words (in my humble opinion) like sh*t, or less harmless ones like f*ck, and I agree, its use is never acceptable, other than within that community itself. But...replacing the i with an asterix, in a word that any adult knows, and nobody in his/her right mind should be offended by, is just...silly. Silly, patronising and hypocritical...."

Mike adds: Thanks, John, for providing the fodder for this post! I was having fun with it, and I hope not too much at your expense. I always found it excruciating—currently spelled "cringe-worthy" or shortened to "cringe"—when my genteel mother, who went to a finishing school and never even heard swearing until she was an adult, self-consciously used profanity because she thought it made her sound hip and young. Ugh. That's echoed when The New Yorker spells out the f-bomb for the exact same reason and with the exact same effect on me.  

Another aspect we didn't talk about is "the style sheet." Any publication has a list of procedures it uses for consistency. These can be quite extensive—see for example The Chicago Manual of Style, also called CMOS. Examples at TOP: When editing Featured Comments, I preserve British spelling if the commenter uses it, like your "apologise," but change the punctuation markings to align with American typographical customs. Or: This publication uses a punctuation mark called an "ellipsis," which looks like this: ... , and then adds a period if the ellipsis occurs at the end of a sentence, like this.... Some publications allow two or three ellipses one after the other, thus six or nine dots, but I don't. So we only use three dots and four dots and that's it. Featured Commenters are not allowed to get away with things like.....................

I keep it all in my head, but the style sheet for TOP would be many pages long if I wrote it all out. And replacing a vowel with an asterisk in certain words that are offensive to some people is just the way I do it here, that's all. All style-sheet conventions are just decisions made by the editor(s) as to how to handle certain situations so that it's always done the same way. One magazine I worked for did not allow one-word widows. So if that's how the text fell on the page, you'd have to step in and add an extra word or two just to push two words into the widow. I, of course, used to play with this, so one time when I got my galleys back with the instruction to remedy a one-word widow I changed the word "freaky" to "freakazoid," which was long enough to do the trick. The galley came right back with a heavy red line through "freakazoid" and the terse marginal note, "do over"...which was the proper, standardized, conventional marking; God forbid the M.E. should write something in the margin like "STOP F*CKING AROUND!!!!!" Famous style-sheet anomalies in national publications are that The New Yorker, going it all alone, uses quotation marks for book titles instead of italics because founding editor Harold Ross made that fateful mistake in 1925, and The New York Times has a longstanding tradition of grimly and rigidly using honorifics no matter who they're talking about, with the incongruous result that the horrific murdering psychopath Jeffrey Dahmer, say, becomes "Mr. Dahmer" in the paper. Those are silly too, but that's the tyranny of the style sheet.

Alan Whiting: "A quote from Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long: 'Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalitites as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they pour sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.' The Spectator (ca. 1711–12) especially commends politeness between husband and wife. Mike, it seems to me you're in good company."

Sean: "I had an Aunt Bridy myself. I can’t recall ever hearing her swear, but her brother, my father, was a world-class curser, as was my mother. Ireland’s oral tradition helped them craft curses like, 'I hope your hole corrupts and festers.' Looking back, I see it as affiliative cursing. I’m all for affiliative politeness, but other types can be cold—especially in the hands of the passive-aggressive and the condescending. And as Ireland knows too well, the English were masters at keeping up appearances while keeping others down."

George: "School 'profanity filters' were real, or at least they were in the early 2000s. We taught an adult course in basic computing at a Government-run college, and one of the textbook exercises involved looking up the 'superbowl' website. The URL included roman numerals which triggered the blocking filter for 'XXX' e.g. Superbowl XXXIV."