WEEKLY WHINE

What is it you're avoiding?

One item common in human nature is the desire not to deal with unpleasant situations. One example I like to cite is found in most forms of general media. Pick up any arbitrary magazine or newspaper to find out what I mean. They will often look for any way to avoid printing one of a certain list of words. The precise members of the list vary from publication to publication, but in essence each is trying to convey the same message: "We're going to pretend that this is a nonexistent word."

One of my favorite examples is the magazine Sports Illustrated, in which the words "f------" and "s---" are frequently quoted. The writers themselves, certainly unwilling to incorporate a disallowed word into the impeccable journalism for which Sports Illustrated is renowned, nonetheless will grant themselves an "ass" every issue or two.

Most of us in this era are more familiar with things that go on in the world of television. Things are the same there: on a given sports news program, wait fot the locker room discussions with the participants in a game: one example might be the Atlanta Hawks' Isaiah Rider after a particularly disheartening loss to Indiana on WED 29 DEC 1999. At the end of the game, he spent some twenty minutes sitting by the side of the court with his head in his hands, and then he told reporters that he'd had enough of his teammates' seeming shortage of concern over the team's underachieving ways. If you saw him on television, you probably heard something like, "People don't care, man. [bleep] I'm tired of this laughing and giggling and [bleep] when we're losing. [bleep]" And so on.

You may have noticed that the words to which I refer are most accessible in the sports world. Athletes generally allow themselves more leeway in this respect than do the people for whom they work. But if you're observant, you'll notice more of the same in non-sports media, such as television news. Ordinary people seem to have the same concern for such language as the aforementioned athletes.

And now we come to my point. If ordinary people are perfectly willing to put these words to use, why aren't ordinary media sources? A potential argument is that mass media, by definition, serves a large fraction of the population simultaneously and has to take care not to offend any significant portion of that audience. Is that true? I would have to say that the mass media continually offends me as well as many other portions of the population by failing to cover the news that actually matters to me. But that is the nature of sources optimized for large numbers of people. That's why I make my own news fresh, two or three times a week, at the Caltech SEDS Space Update, and it's for you too.

Plugs aside, a walk around the town where you live could well show you that people really aren't afraid to utilize colorful language for any purpose. The advantage of these words is that they are usually short and easy to say, meaning that they can be said in most any situation. That is their versatility. I'd have to say that our society has reached the point at which people who choose to say or write these words should have no fear of persecution from their fellow people.

At this point maybe you are saying, "And what about you? Is GoobNet really willing to put its reputation on the line with a strategically placed 'fuck' in an effort to pave the way toward this new society?"

Well, it's too late now, so yes.