I’ve noticed recently that hearing a formerly innocuous common verb now has the power to send people reeling in involuntary disgust. If a bridge player says, for example, “my heart *****s your diamond” or a scientist says “this principle is *****ed by that principle,” people are now prone to grimacing, as if in a sudden spasm of unbearable pain, at the mere sound of the word in question.<\/p>\n
Alas, this formerly useful word has now become associated with a certain intellectually and emotionally challenged individual in political office. How strange that a person can be in a position to rain unspeakable destruction upon our world, while lacking the ability to, say, read and understand a letter of resignation written by his own Secretary of Defense.<\/p>\n
I feel especially bad for bridge players, who cannot avoid the now tainted word. I myself have started to carefully avoid it, because of the look of agonized horror I see upon people’s faces the moment they hear the sound of it. <\/p>\n
Instead, I find myself reaching for some other word, even if the resultant meaning is less exact. After all, common decency *****s grammatical precision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve noticed recently that hearing a formerly innocuous common verb now has the power to send people reeling in involuntary disgust. If a bridge player says, for example, “my heart *****s your diamond” or a scientist says “this principle is *****ed by that principle,” people are now prone to grimacing, as if in a sudden … Continue reading “I feel bad for bridge players”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20633"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20633"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20639,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20633\/revisions\/20639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}