From: Tom Sweetnam (savamutt@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Sep 06 2000 - 15:07:38 PDT
>Fork is above all a place where the chips fall where they will.
Paul Fussel, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and professor of English
Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, is far and away my favorite
social commentarian. This curmudgeon-at-large notes in his wonderful
critique of America's social strata, 'Class', that it is the middle classes
and the mediocre in academia who are most likely to be offended by
occasional profanity, pornography, or blasphemy. For that matter, he
speculates that our aversion to profanity has turned our culture into
something even more profane than the object of that aversion could ever make
it left alone.
He goes on to say that it is the upper crust and the stellar minds in
academia and society at large who are far less likely to take offense with
the occasional fuck, shit, asshole, or whatever.
I'm a writer at heart. I respect the language. But what the fuck (or what
the ForK...take your pick), every now and then an adjective with a jagged
edge comes in real handy. So even I may take personal offensive at popping
up a ForK thread involving homosexual bondage or post after post in which
mutilation of the King's English seems the only locus of the thread, but I
don't take offense for very long, because in the society that I cherish, it
can't be any other way.
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