We have lots of words

Musings on the overuse of some of them—ok... one of them

Admittedly, things are looking pretty dark. We have a doddering, obsessive clown for a president. The puppet masters are destroying the country and no one in the government is ready (or able) to do much about it.

At some point, I hope, SOMETHING will stop the madness. However, so much harm has already been done that it will take decades to fix it all. It will take a congress that is steadfast and functioning, i.e., everyone is talking with and listening to each other. A gal can dream, can’t she?

It seems some good is coming from this mess. Canada is becoming more self-reliant. Europe is coming together and growing stronger. I’m sure that, eventually, our ship of state will be lifted off the reef of cowardice, greed, and incompetence and again steer us in the right direction. In the meantime, I can only hope that our life’s savings will see us through. And that the perpetrators/traitors will be brought to justice and made powerless, convicted of their crimes and maybe detained in the prisons of their own making. Seems just to me.

Yesterday, after a long day of laundry, bookkeeping and boring paper pushing, I went to SubStack to find some good—or at least comforting no matter how bleak—news (thank you Heather Cox Richardson, The Dworkin Report, and Liza Donnelly). However, with the exception of the Portland Frog, much of my feed was occupied by rants and expletives. I seem to have fallen down a hellscape rabbit hole of people using the same crude words to express their opinions… words that neither help nor express much. SubStack, I thought, was a platform for expression… not for such base rhetoric. I stopped scrolling, picked up my knitting and began stitching myself back together. But this morning, I found myself rebelling against the lazy crap in that rabbit hole where “fuck” and “shit” were beating out “Care,” “Kind,” and “Love” or even “Stop” and “Help”.

For heaven’s sake, use your words, people! There are so many! Why rely on only one or two? Be clever, be direct, described your anger and disgust and BE SUBSTACK WORTHY!

I am not a prude. I am as fond of the word “fuck” as anyone. It is incredibly versatile—a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, and—my favorite—an interstitial! Un-fucking-believable! But people are wearing it out and that will neutralize its usefulness.

Save the word from its inevitable decline—find other words to describe the situation. Otherwise, when you stub your toe in the darkness surrounding us, you won’t be able to call on the word to truly describe your pain and anger. It will be too mundane—a milk toast of an expletive.

Be creative, invent your own one syllable four letter word. Practice it daily for a bit. Who knows? If it catches on, as do many new terms invented by generations younger than mine or yours, it might end up in the OED and you will be noted as the quintessential wordsmith that we all know you could be!

I, myself, am struggling to find the one syllable word I could use that fits the mouth so perfectly. I may have to find something in another language—perhaps from my Quebecois heritage. My grandfather and uncles who worked in the lumber camps and on the farms were never short of some swear words. Admittedly some have more syllables but they are wonderfully colorful and have a certain cachet.

I’ll have to think about it. No matter—the search for the right swear word should take my mind off the fucking shit show going on now.

P.S.: Oddly, my SubStack feed this morning is remarkably devoid of the above mentioned expletive. Weird…

P.P.S.: Saw the word “Kind”! Made my day, Sue P.