Letter 126 - I've got a bone to pick

Ah, the evolution of art. How does it happen, you might wonder. Well, kind of like this. If you’ve been a reader for a while you’ll know that I like to pour “fancy” coffees. Lovey gets one every morning to start her day right.

And a typical, no muss, no fuss cup will be something like this:

A nice little floral cuppa coffee.

Well, recently I was pouring and I was tired and rather than a nicely symmetric design I got this:

And my first thought was “Hey, that looks like the vertebrae at the base of a dinosaur’s tail! I googled and decided that it was closest to a T-Rex and so I did a skull to match, from my memory of my time spent at the well known Paleolithic Dino-Ribs restaurant chain:

Yeah, I had the same thought. Doesn’t really look much like a T-Rex skull, does it? Pretty crummy attempt.

So the next day I Googled T-Rex skeletons, saw how they ACTUALLY looked, and managed a better result:

And thus - happy days. I figured I’d just butt the two together and call it an eon:

See? Your imagination fills in the rest, right?!

Sigh. No, that’s not right. Having done a nicely rendered head, my tail vertebrae no longer pleased me. And how bogus is it to just have two bits of dinosaur? I’ll answer - totally bogus.

So … next time up at the coffee bar I did his torso:

Followed by his tail the next day:

And then put them all together, sized them appropriately, cropped where appropriate and … voila!

Ahhhh. Finally I could rest from my labors - the T-Rex in a cup was complete.

But how many cups will it take to do a brontosaurus?! Maybe I’ll just do a turtle next instead- way more compact.

So let’s see, I think it’s time for some bitching and moaning, don’t you? And the topic is - language. More specifically, the way Americans have perpetuated a, to me at least, completely primitive approach that hearkens back to witch doctors, bad juju, belief in evil spirits and a crazed acceptance of “taboo”. Words so horrible that they cannot be uttered, lest disaster befall all who hear them.

I’m referring to “bad language”. Which to me is simply “language”.

I’ve never liked the whole concept of “you can’t say THAT in front of children or in front of ladies or in front of ‘fill in the group’”. My simple minded approach has always been “If it’s part of the English language, if you can look it up in a dictionary, then it’s what we call a “word” and as such is used in what we call “sentences””. There’s no scary power about them - they’re simply words with an associated meaning. When someone makes believe they’re somehow more than that I see (in my mind) someone with a bone through their nose who holds up magic sticks to ward off evil spirits and who, basically, is acting like what we used to refer to as “an ignorant savage”.

The silliest example is the use of the asterisk. Like this, an excerpt from a recent post dealing with an F1 racing driver:

After his final qualifying effort, Leclerc made his feelings clear over the radio.

"F---, f---, f---, f---, f--- that," he shouted. "So f---ing shit I am. I am so f---ing shit. That's all I am."

This resonated for two reasons. First off all, a different driver some little time back had the audacity to use the word “shit” in a press conference. As in “My driving was just such shit.” Purely descriptive. A more casual way of saying “The quality of my driving was notably below expectations.” But because he used TABOO language he was fined something around $30,000.

Yes. Fined actual money for speaking in the absolutely usual manner of all drivers.

And yet, you’ll note that Leclerc above said the same word plus the even MORE taboo “fuck”. And interestingly wasn’t fined but oddly the writers decided they needed to censor fuck with asterisks but leave shit alone.

Which of course ignores the fact that when anyone reads “sh*t” they mentally fill in the missing “i” and when they see, as above, “f—-” they mentally supply the needed “uck”. There isn’t anything happening other than wasting time and energy with the silly placeholders that doesn’t get in the way of understanding.

And what if some poor innocent eight year old didn’t know what “f—-” meant (and was advanced enough to be reading an F1 racing article)? They’d just ask their older sister and be promptly informed of the meaning. And then they’d move on with life, not worse for wear.

Yet another form of primitive censorship for no reason occurred in an article discussing what Lando Norris said in an after-race interview. He was asked what was going through his mind and answered: