The Daily Word for August 27, 2021

 

coprolalia - noun - involuntary use of obscene language

I have to apologize for the pause in the action of this blog. This past Wednesday and Thursday, I found myself in a woodsy retreat, not unlike Thoreau's haunt ("happy place"?) Walden Pond with a small group of women friends. One of my closest "gal pals" decided to lure us up there to celebrate her birthday, which we did in grand fashion...if you consider hiking amidst copulating dragon flies, swimming with trout and pike, and paddle boarding to be grand. I do. I am perennially thankful for what most would consider trivial. Yet I digress, sort of. This morning at brunch just before I left for home, one of the ladies, the mother of two grown sons, broached a topic, the amorality of today's youth, pinpointing profane language. It seems that the habitual use of the f-bomb could fall under the nomenclature of "Coprolalia," a very pretty word for words that aren't pretty. Indeed, it is as though use of profanity is no longer voluntary due to its commonality in American English. In fact, just last week while at the Comedy Cove listening and observing nascent comedians in performance, Jack (you know him from P.A.) claimed that "fuck" is the perfect filler word. WTF! See what I mean? So much for "um" and "and" and "like," I suppose. So Jack, you think that the term should be no more than a monosyllabic, audible sigh? Really? Have we sunken this low? Obscenities are no longer obscene? If so, Webster's will soon have to remove "obscene" and all derivatives and synonyms from the dictionary. 

Needless to say, I am a bit dumbstruck. I'm thinking I'll have to cover Bob Dylan's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" substituting "Where Have All the Pretty Words Gone?" as the title and at the start of the song's chorus. It might make for a fairly decent parody. I'll be lucky if I can get one person to embrace the point: Coprolalia is ubiquitous. So much so, that we no longer notice, especially that kids as young as four are using it and their parents are shrugging it off as normal. Okay, maybe as a society we haven't hit rock bottom yet, but it is "coming soon to a theater near you." Can we at least be a little more sensitive to who is standing within range of the f-bomb before we drop it? 

Just a suggestion for the betterment of humankind on this final Friday in August. 

Thanks for reading. 

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