It has always struck me that English is filled with little jokes. The employment of certain words and turns of phrase as a joke that have passed into the everyday language. Since I don't speak other languages I can have no idea if other speakers do this as well. I imagine they do but I've seen no literature. The French have a phrase ,"escalier", which refers to what you wish you had said earlier while you were on the stairs, leaving. I know of no other examples. People seem to have a playful nature. That's a good thing.
In English we refer to someone who is angry as being mad. That's a joke comparing the actions of a mad dog to a person who has lost his temper. It's so apt it has become a synonym.
Americans are sometimes fond of referring to an unfortunate circumstance as just so much tough shit. The British are more eloquent. They employ the phrase" hard cheese". If you are fond of sharp cheeses you know, first hand, exactly what they mean. I recommend coffee. The British also employ a really obscene image. Their use of the term "bloody" this or "bloody" that is a reference to menstruation. Did you think they had nicked themselves shaving?
I wonder if pew, as in church, has some association with pew, as in close proximity?
When we sleep, little crusties accumulate in the corners of our eyes. The proper word for those things is "smut". That has come to be synonymous with various forms of published obscenity.
Trying to define obscenity caused one Supreme Court Justice to remark he couldn't define it but he knew it when he saw it. In a way that almost echos the sentiment that "I don't know about art but I know what I like." Funny how things like that work out. The idea that there is some ober-class that can be unaffected by these things and are therefore qualified to decide what the "average" person can see is a laughable, mindless insult.
The internet and the fact everyone has a camera on their cell phone has rendered most debate about the distribution of "smut" moot. You show me yours, I'll show you mine. The cloak has been removed from even The House of Representative's cloak room. Wanna see what Donald sees in Melania? It's just a click away. You could see it as the democratization of....prudery? In the end there can be no pornography without prudery. It's all just a part of that tension that has to exist in human affairs in order to render meaning. It just is. Kurt Vonnegut submitted a thesis topic on the opposition of good and evil in simple tales that was rejected. He then made a career of just that kind of thing. It just is.
However, we still have to understand, quantify and explain these things, if not to our children at least to ourselves.
In the end it boils down to this: It's not what you hear, it's what you think of it. It's not what you see, it's what you think of it. It's not what you read, it's what you think of it. As we seem to always find, it's a matter of teaching people to think clearly. Some days that seems like a joke in and of itself.
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