Miscellaneous Ramblings

2002-07-24 || 12:20 p.m.

I have talked before about the decline of American culture recently, maybe not in the diary, but at least to all two of the readers. I have a question: What will we do for obscene words when words that are currently obscene lose their shock power? You wonder what I'm talking about. Ok, in the sixties or seventies, George Carlin did an act called "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television". At least three and maybe even four of them can now be said on television. They've lost their shock power. Another exapmle: when Howard Stern first went on the air, he had people saying he was evil incarnate because he said the word "penis" on the air. That no longer shocks people. We're used to it now. To get the same reaction, he has to fondle his guest host's breasts and threaten to spank her on the air.

So, what will happen when we no longer have a vocabulary of shocking words? Will we invent new ones? The trouble is that then, they have to take time to spread into the culture, and by the time they're commonly known and in the dictionary, they too will be useless. Perhaps it will become shocking to not use them. I don't know. At this point, I barely remember my name; a four hour physics lecture and no food since yesterday other than a banana will do that to you. And so I depart, leaving you all by yourself to make sense of this jumbled, rambling mess I've just written. Toodles.