Not that I'm drawing any connection here, you understand. What I had in mind was a comment on cursing, although come to think of it there is quite a bit of that on other blogs, in a rather puerile form - what Tom Wolfe, in I Am Charlotte Simmons, calls fuck patois - a form first glimpsed by a neighbor of mine some 25 years or so ago as he was observing his daughter, recently returned home after completing her first year in college, walk barefoot in the back yard. That was, you will recall (if you have performed the calculation properly), the time "free speech" was all the rage on college campuses (and whatever happened to that?), and my friend's daughter had embraced her freedom with considerable gusto. On this occasion, suddenly and without warning she began hopping furiously on one foot and muttering to herself, "Oh shit, I stepped in the dog doo-doo."
I trust you see my point. The vocabulary of Wolfe's fuck patois consists of words which have taken leave of meaning and now exist only as a spectrum of sounds, a sort of verbal punctuation to the style of expression known as "edgy."
Now, I'm all for edge. But I say, if it's edge we must have then let's have edge with some edge. There was a day long ago when cursing was cursing, and not just a random assembly of obligatory but miscellaneous sounds. So to the extent there is cursing employed on this blog, and to the extent I intend to make vows about this blog, I vow to at least try to get it right.
Other than that, if you want to know what's on the other blogs go read them for yourself. I'm not saying I'll ignore them completely here (no I don't intend to make a lot of vows about this blog) but they are not, you may as well know, high on my list of concerns. Just go up to the top of this page, type what you want to read about in the little box, and click on "Search All Blogs."
There, that's the spirit.
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(The picture is just here for a place to put it.)
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