Somewhere along the long slouching road to the new millennium, it became possible to do what in a baby boomer’s childhood was unthinkable and what landed Lenny Bruce in stir: the regular enunciation of profanity in public venues, often nightclubs, but more typically the airwaves and the general fiefdom overseen by the FCC, that being everything from the old standbys of major broadcasters to the more coven haunts of music stores, streaming media of the wondrous world wide web, e-zines, and blogs (an expression whose onomatopoetic echoes call to mind the sucking sound of boots wading through mud or something which small animals get mired in and drown, which speaking figuratively is probably the case). Such words, four-letter and otherwise, were once the mainstay of the local burlesque and “girly” magazines (a curiously demeaning expression as used among manly men, but employed here to allude to their illicit joys). Today, however, profanities are no more secret than the day’s weather or the inner lives of celebrities or politicians (though the latter could well be an oxymoron, but that is another story altogether).
 
Growing up in the twilight of Ike’s presidency, a child could go for years or seasons or moons, without encountering so much as a friggin,’ let alone a hardy fuck or fuck you. One might even recall with fondness poor Holden Caufield’s wish to protect children from such vile assaults on their sense and sensibilities. In the 21st century, such a wish could find no ready believers, having been blessed as we are with a steady parade of comics finding the easy road to the risqué by sprinkling their routines with daubs of Fs, FUs, CSs, MFs, and MFCSs (that we all can easily divine the meaning of this alphabet spew says something in itself, whether that be our worldliness, our childishness, or our long acquaintance with government agencies, computer gizmos, or license-plate speak is hard to say).
 
Many would have us believe that the license to spray profanities is protected by the Bill of Rights, in this case the right to free speech, though what is freed by this speech is a bit of a mystery, other than the instincts of the puerile or the emotional outpourings of junior high schoolers. It also has its defenders in those who seek to protect the anger and bitterness of the urban poor’s various mouthpieces—the many rappers and DJs and MCs and bling bearers who have found it more profitable to sample other artists’ music and pretend that what they are doing isn’t plagiarism if not outright theft than to actually align a series of notes on a bar and write lyrics that might offer richer voice to their pain, no matter how far it might fall short of the speech of such singers as Ishmael Reed or Dr King.
 
But we digress. The steady demeaning of our sensibilities through a constant satellite feed of profanity has made it impossible to accent our anger or raise the bar of our horror or tap the root of our bitterness with expressions once reserved for the basest of miscreants and their deeds. We toss off fucks and fuck-you’s as casually as we once said damnit or shit, which in turn we habituated ourselves to after crap and Jesus lost their piquancy and emblematic heft.
 
So, what to do, if anything? It might be easy to believe that another more genteel era’s genteel speech would yield better human beings, a belief held and told by idiots. Yet, are we, and is our vernacular, worse for the wear from the steady wearing out of the caustic bite of words once Bowdlerized in the pages of The Naked and the Dead? Have we lost the raw, visceral voice we might reserve for those found guilty of lynching or the abuse of an infant, having used it instead to address someone who cuts us off in traffic? What is cheapened by our casual acceptance of profanity?
 
Of course asking this question is to run the risk of being tarred a censor, prude, or born-again nutcase, if not all three. It occurs to me to ask it, having just returned from a park where I overheard a half-dozen half-pints with the mouths of sailors extolling the virtues of each other’s mothers, sisters, and girl friends. These wee lads all seemed quite incapable of executing their desires, but their intimate knowledge of anatomy bespoke a good understanding of which members of which group did what and how to whom. Such schoolyard taunts are the stuff of many a childhood, but these boys’ young lives owned all the insight and attitude of the likes of Howard Stearn, who by himself is probably keeping several tens of millions of American males in a terminal state of arrested development, that arrest generally commencing in about the fifth grade.
 
One might say language is cheapened by the continued lowering of the bar and widespread acceptance of what were once jailable offenses. But can language be cheapened? Is it something that attaches such qualities to itself? Cheapening something means, if anything, diminishing its value. And the only value language can have is to communicate. If that it is so, then surely our current diet of fuck, fucked, fuck off, fuck up, and fuck it is robbing someone, somewhere of power of these words, for they certainly were once worth much more insofar as they could alarm passions, run radio stations out of business, get people slapped across the face, slapped in the cooler, or quality time with a bar of soap.
 
If we agree that language can be cheapened, are these particular coins worth saving? In other words, would hearing a toddler ask for a fucking candy bar have us wonder where the tyke came by his diction or simply leave us aghast that he was familiar with it at all? In the right setting, such an outburst could be funny, provided it were rare—which is probably how we might come by it. But with time, we’ll find this neither rare nor alarming nor humorous but typical. And being typical, eliciting no more interest or condemnation than smoking in bars once did. Ah, we’ll say, the good old days.
In debasing the coin of our lexicon, we may find replacements as we did for shit and damnit. Profanity inflation has increased the cost of being lewd, for it now takes ten or so fuck you’s where once one or two would do. But replacements for the bottom of the barrel are hard to come by and may require importing as well as an extended period of general dissemination before they can find ready adoption and exchange in the vernacular. In the meantime we have little choice but to either raise the cost for using profanities or withdraw some from circulation. Failing to do so, we may discover that we are, well, fucked.

Unhappily Trump's gift to America is a GOP white elephant. The party of Lincoln, the great emancipator, is now in thrall to a serial adulterer, serial bankrupt, and serial liar. His ability to infect his followers with belief in lies is only matched by Hitler's. Yes, I know comparisons to Hitler are always called out as being over the top, but how else should I interpret his constant haranguing that the last election was stolen from him? His biggest lie ever — a lie that about three-quarters of the republican electorate believe despite no credible evidence, dozens of court rulings, multiple recounts that found nothing, and onetime stalwarts of power in the GOP like William Barr and Chris Christie categorically denying that there was any widespread fraud in 2020 that would have overturned the results of the election. Hitler's "stabbed in the back" has the same resonance among those who wave Stop the Steal flags as it did among the embittered Germans of post-WWI.
 
Had Trump vociferously encouraged mask-wearing, social distancing, and getting a "Trump" vaccine as soon as possible, he would still be president. Instead, he yielded to his base, whipped up their resentment of science and "expertise," and encouraged them to do the most selfish thing they could: disregard the health and safety of their fellow Americans. And the constant drumbeat about election integrity, one whose merit has no founding or proof, has brought us to the place where retired generals are publishing Op-Eds alerting us to the likelihood of a coup in 2024. Republicans have controlled the White House for 12 of the past 20 years; only four of those years have resulted from a Republican having gotten more votes than his Democratic opponent. How this is, feels, or is democratic is beside the point. It is a fact. And now, through gerrymandering, installing "stop the steal" partisans to election boards, and the guise of "election integrity," the party of Lincoln has betrayed its founding father beyond all imagining. The thirst for power has overwhelmed the need for truth, accepted facts, and any semblance of honor, integrity, or commitment to the constitution that so many in the GOP claim to hold so dear.
 
People like Lindsey Graham insist that the party must work with Trump. The party, he seems to forget, is made up of individuals who need only follow their own judgment, integrity, and commitment to democratic means. The party's leadership has cast its lot with a charlatan who denies the truth, belittles opponents with names designed to shame them, and lies and lies and lies. Trump's enablers in the media — be it Fox pundits (none of whom are credible journalists) and the new gang of rightwing propagandists of Breitbart and One America News Network (the name itself is overtly fascistic) — have decided it is better to chase ratings rather than truth. Needing to work with Trump feels like Neville Chamberlain’s willingness to work with Hitler. How one works with a liar, grifter, and outright fraud is hard to countenance. It’s not unlike making a deal with someone robbing your home: you can take the silver but leave the heirlooms alone.
 
The growing talk of civil war has me wondering if it's time to buy a gun. Something I could do so with little more hassle than getting a library card and which I will be able to carry without permit or training if the NRA and politicians in its thrall have their way. 
 
I am a white male, soon to turn 70. I was raised an FDR democratic and remain one. The sadness that the headlines deliver to me every day since the arrival of Trump is only deepened by having family members who are part of the Trump cult. The great American experiment in truth, freedom, the rule of law, and the belief in the power of an educated citizenry has been unwound by the tribalism of social media, the loss of public truth, and the bitterness of a class of people whose anger and resentments are lodged in emotion, not fact. The Age of Reason seems so distant as to be unimaginable in today's world. 
 
How this ends, I have no idea. I fear for the worst. Hope for the best. And continue looking for reason to rise.

​Most of the words we use every day are little ones. A syllable or two, sometimes three. But for some reason, many folks confuse big words with erudition, aka, smarts. But that’s just not the case. Winston Churchill, who knew a bit about the power of words, once said, “short words are best, and old words when short are best of all.” By old words he meant the simple ones of old English origin. Mom and Dad. Love and hate. Good and bad.  Bread and milk. Fight and flee. Come and go. Rise and shine. You get the idea.
 
There’s simply nothing better than tough old English words, the ones free of French, Latin, or Spanish influences. I’m not against foreign tongues influencing ours. As our tongue grew, it was happy to grab words from other tribes. So we think nothing of saying avant-garde, carte blanche, cliché, déjà vu, diva, emoji, fiasco, macho, motto, pasta, patio, pizza, solo, typhoon, and tsunami, to name but a few. It’s a long list. Generally, we don’t care where words come from. We care about getting our points across. Or we should. And when we do grab words from other tongues, they’re often small ones.
 
Big words have their place of course. And when no other word but a big one will do, go for it. But for any other reason is foolish. It’s easy to fall into the trap of big words. It’s an easy way to show off. And it’s often used to bully or shame readers for being no nothings. But know somethings — Churchill and Hemingway, for example — know better. Stop obfuscating. Start simple. Limit the big words. Small words kick ass.
 
©2021 John Hofmeister. 

Want a simple way to make your writing more vigorous, readable, and actionable?

Get rid of all those nouns with verbs buried inside them. Just googling “smothered verbs” will give you lots of examples of how and why this writing habit gets in the way of sturdy English prose. You can easily break this habit by turning nouns like discussion, information, reduction, and conclusion into action verbs — discuss, inform, reduce, and conclude. Your prose will get sharper. Become more readable. Less likely to induce boredom, eye rolls, and yeah whatever.

And take notice of that suffix in all these nouns — -ion. If you skim your copy and find them, you’re probably smothering verbs. Bureaucracies — whether public or private — are fond of smothered verbs because active verbs force writers to clarify who’s doing what to whom. Saying something like “there will be a reduction in our salesforce” sounds less threatening than “we will be reducing our salesforce.” People get fired. Nobody seems to be doing the firing.

Smothered verbs invariably invite passive verb constructions, where stuff happens seemingly by magic, the magic being that it absolves doers of doing anything. It’s the sort of opacity week-kneed lawyers, administrators, politicians, and bureaucrats strive for. Stop giving them quarter. Free a verb today!

©2021 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved.

I’m sure there are many NRA members who aren’t idiots. Unfortunately for the organization, those members don’t make news. And regardless of one’s opinion of the NRA, the appearance of gun-toting goofballs at the protests against decrees to prevent the spread of the coronavirus makes me wonder: Why are they bringing assault weapons to these protests?  The decrees aren’t restricting the rights to bear arms, although some decrees have shuttered shooting ranges where the bored or insecure gather to enjoy themselves or feel powerful unloading on paper tigers or whatever their inert and harmless targets happen to be. Are they planning to assault the legislators? Their governors? Counter-protesters? They not only like walking about carrying a big stick, but wish to yell loudly with childish displays of their dearest possessions. “I took my AR-57 into the rotunda, baby. Boy, I showed them. No one’s gonna tell me what to do. And this mask isn’t keeping me from this overhyped virus shit — it’s keeping me from being identified by the deep state.” That would be the deep state that keeps sending their grandmas checks every month, makes hamburger edible, lakes fishable, air breathable, water drinkable, modern live livable, and yet doesn’t seem to mind if citizens stroll about in public with oversized badges of dimwittery. Like anxious grammarians who believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket with every split infinitive, they believe it’s going to hell because they can’t figure out who made them so stupid in the first place. Even that is beyond the ken of the state, however deep.