Hello bloggers.

Last week we paid respects to Tim Russert.  Now, more recently, we lost another great person in George Carlin.  They called him a comedian, but I looked on him as a sage who commented on the human experience from a humorous but wise perspective.  I saw a snippet of an interview he had done on television about the court case that had gone all the way to the Supreme Court over his use of so-called bad words.  The interviewer said, “Why did you have to use the word ‘fuck?’”  He answered, “To me, it’s like salt and pepper.  It gives spice to the ordinary language.”

I often think of George Carlin when I meditate on my own views about four-letter words.  We have so encapsulated ourselves in the niceties of things.  On the one hand, we take great delight in hidden messages, giggling daintily at the double-entendre, but then when someone really comes out and says the word, we’re all appalled.  Carlin said that those words are powerful because words are given great power—not by the person saying them but by the person who detests saying them or hearing them.  We try to make the words that describe the body and the sex acts and other things so beyond the pale, so off the wall, that to even ban them from speech gives them that much more power.  So Carlin said he used them regularly, probably to agitate the people who needed agitating.  I say Amen to that!

Sometimes I wonder about people who get so upset when someone says a four-letter word.  Do they live in a cocoon?  Or do they just like the feeling of getting pissed off about nothing and then ignoring millions of people starving to death or being thrown in gas chambers?  In George Carlin we have lost one of the voices that made us think about these kinds of questions.  His genius was that he knew better than to hit us over the head with these things, but instead gave them a twist of humor.  I think of what my mother always said:  A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.  George Carlin knew that.  He will be missed. 

Matt