Thursday, October 21, 2021

Rock-tober 21, 2021

One of the biggest hurdles for non-native English speakers is the concept of slang. There just aren't any concrete grammatical rules governing its usage. What rules do exist can vary from region to region in the country and even within the borders of a given state.

Within the confines of slang, there's a subset that pertains to profanity, and there's definitely a skill to its usage. You could just string a series of four-letter words together, but it would lack intended impact. Perhaps the most important skill is differentiating what constitutes profanity in your general locale from its innocuous counterparts.

Mom told me that in her hometown back in the Philippines, English was a required course in primary school and was taught alongside Tagalog, the country's official language. As a result, she and her siblings had an exceptional command of the language, with the exception of slang - and by extension, profanity.

In the early '70s, when we were in Annapolis, Mom worked the night shift as a nurse at the base hospital. At that time, her responsibilities included dictating patient status notes into a handheld recorder as she made her rounds. One night, a patient of hers had....difficulties, and Mom dutifully documented the incident in her recorder. At the end of her shift, she labeled the tapes and left them for attending doctors to review the next day.

She arrived for her tour of duty that evening, and when she entered the staff lounge, all eyes cut to her. And then the laughter started. Taken aback, she asked what happened. A day shift supervisor attempted to stifle her guffaws, "Brenda! You've really surprised us!" Mom was still puzzled, but she learned very quickly not to use slang unless you understand its proper usage and ramifications.

They were all listening to Mom's recorded notes from the previous night, and one in particular, in today's vernacular, was going viral. Mom was describing her patient with gastrointestinal issues. "Mr. Smith had an accident during the night and there was shit everywhere. The linens and mattress were soiled in shit, and Mr. Smith himself was covered in shit. Several orderlies had to be dispatched because there was even shit on the floor and the walls."

Mom, of course, wasn't intending to be vulgar. She was just not aware of the full etymology of shit and its incarnations. However, Gary Abbot dropped a barely audible F-bomb in this recording to accurately characterize his frustration after he dropped his drum sticks. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find it.


The Kingsmen - "Louie Louie"

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