Euphemisms that become "vulgar"

I mostly hate writing about news like this (anything related to reactionary or so-called populist conservatism), but I think it's interesting how the "Let's Go Brandon" phrase has caused such a stir. It's a misheard line that then became the joke and a not-so-secret "code" phrase for what the chanters really meant (something vulgar and not very deep or informational). It seems to me that the code phrase, at least, evolved from humor and then caught on as a kind of euphemism so people could say one thing while meaning another. And then others decided that a code phrase is just as bad as the real thing. I disagree, in the sense that at least for most children not following the news, you'd still have to explain it. During the Obama years, there were "F*3k Obama" bumper stickers and t-shirts all over the place, and it was all not very clever and just a bit too angry.

Winner, winner chicken dinner.

It is interesting how euphemisms will evolve like that. When a was a youth leader many years ago -- a very young man in charge of younger boys -- I tried to stop the boys from cursing all the time. I told them to substitute the word "chicken" any time they wanted to cuss. I thought it was the equivalent of encouraging people to say "gosh darn." But "chicken" being the word it is -- and 12-year-old boys being who they are -- the boys thought it was hilarious and began using it all the time. "Chicken you," they'd say, or "chicken that." The cursing via euphemism probably increased our overall cursing problem by 10 fold. It was fun, but eventually we had to curb that habit also. This is what you get for trying to make boys behave. 

Beer is Proof that God Loves Us

Of the many quotes falsely attributed to Ben Franklin (who, like Mark Twain, is a natural persona to hang almost any pithy quote on), the one that makes the most sense to me is "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." For one thing, although Franklin never said this about beer, he apparently wrote something very similar about wine in a letter, so the spirit of the line is there. More importantly, though, is that it's more in line with Franklin's general lifestyle and attitude than the many quotes attributed to him like "a penny saved is a penny earned." That one, too, is apparently not exactly what Franklin said, but it's more in keeping with the prim and proper, later-Puritan persona that we generally identify Franklin with. 

Photo of pint of Blue Moon (taken by me). 

Like so many of the other aphorisms attributed to Franklin, the "penny saved" saying comes from Poor Richard's Almanac, and, like so many of these other familiar quotes, Franklin either created or cribbed them as a way of filling out his almanac with useful bits of everyday wisdom. That's not to say this was who he was. Though a prudent man by many measures -- a man who lived a long and prosperous life -- he was also a highly sociable man, one who enjoyed the company of women. He liked to drink and entertain those around him. He played the guitar and enjoyed the many pleasures of worldly existence, including wine, food, and song. So the "beer" quote, while not exactly accurate, is much more aligned with Franklin's true persona, at least as far as I'm concerned. Franklin had much Puritan heritage and knowledge to draw on for his practical purposes, but he was also a transitional figure, a leading intellectual and inventor during the Enlightenment who helped to guide the colonies out of their Puritan past. 

Franklin is a distant relative of mine (his grandfather was also my direct ancestor, so he's some kind of cousin, nth removed), so I naturally feel a kinship (or pretend to) with his more complex persona, and especially with his idea of happiness and the part of his personal philsophy that might be deemed Epicurean, though it's only one aspect of the man. This is also the guy that basically invented the modern versions of the lending library, post office, and fire department, so there's a lot more than a love of beer going on. But that's also proof that a little wine and song don't necessarily lead to an unproductive life. 

As a brief update to this post: I realized I posted this just a day before Independence Day, without consciously thinking about the patriotic connections, though maybe I was thinking of Ben Franklin for a reason. One sad note about his life is that he basically sacrificed his relationship with his son, who was a British loyalist, in order to support the Revolution. It's a sad thought, but it also should underline the clarity with which the patriots saw the importance of independence. (More recently, people take the idea of abandoning family for political purposes too lightly, with a focus on loyalty to a single man.) I propose a toast to Ben Franklin and everything he stood for on this July 4th. 

'Sopranos' and the 90s aesthetic

 We've been rewatching some "Sopranos" episodes, and it's interesting to note how the styles and general aesthetics seem rather dated just a few years later. The series ran from 1999-2007, for six seasons, but its first three seasons aired before 9/11, and it seems the series never really loses its 1990s vibe or aesthetic. Some things -- giant oversized SUVs and flip phones -- while dated, didn't evolve much during the early 2000s, but there are lots of other things that seem more firmly grounded in the Nineties. There's the McMansions and "great rooms" (which even figure into the dialogue), the blond-wood furniture and overstuffed couches. The younger characters (the kids and teenagers) are always playing video games on the TV, and everybody is mindlessly consumeristic. Microwave foods and easy snacks supplement the characters' regular, heavy Italian cuisine. They drink Miller Genuine Draft and Stoli vodka. (Maybe Stoli isn't particularly a 90s vodka, but it's the first time I heard of it, and liquors do tend to have their heydays. Smirnoff, still the top-selling brand in the U.S., used to be considered "top shelf" and still is in the U.K. U.S. consumers in particular can be very fickle.)

 

Dress Code Distractions

This is not the kind of topic I'd normally write about, since it's been covered to death in national media, but a recent news item brought up several ideas and memories for me related to education and teaching. A high school recently gained national attention when it was revealed that the yearbook advisor had photoshopped a number of girls' photos that she decided were too revealing. The negative attention was well deserved, to say the least. It seems right, as the critics have said, that the controversy sheds light on a long-running tendency of dress codes to be biased against girls and that the additional attention brought on the girls by the editing only reinforced ideas about body shaming.

These dress codes are often defended, as they were in this case, as helping to avoid "distractions," which places the responsibility squarely on the girls for the behavior and mindset of boys. We can do a better job of educating young men to be respectful.

Here's me in high school, not violating dress codes but clearly needing some wardrobe assistance. 

The editing itself, besides sending the wrong message about shame, was also poorly done and represented a violation in and of itself -- changing someone's image without their permission. It reminded me of one of the first ideas I learned in a college photography class when discussing the ethics of photography: while there are legal guidelines about what photos you are allowed to take and who is allowed to edit them, there are also ethical concerns and even possible legal violations with photographing and/or misrepresenting people. In my long-ago photography class, the instructor told us how Native Americans sometimes viewed their photographs as a kind of "stealing of the spirit" and were very reluctant to be photographed in the early days of photography. As I recall, being cocky young people, we sort of laughed at the corny way in which this professor presented this idea, but I also remembered the general fact (which apparently is true, and some Native Americans still resist being photographed) long after learning it. She was a good instructor, and I'm embarassed to remember my attitude in that class.

The idea of girls' outfits being "distracting" also reminded me of how long this discussion has been going on, and it brought to mind a certain uncomfortable moment in my high-school precalculus class. I don't remember the teacher's name, but he was middle-aged man who had worked as an engineer and was now teaching math to high schoolers. (But he was no Jaime Escalante.) For some reason, before class started, the girls were talking about the dress code and the prohibition on skirts above the knee. The teacher, who was standing at the front of the room, with an obvious vantage point that made his comment quite unnerving, offered that too-short skirts were in fact "distracting" for him as well as for the male students. He said this matter-of-factly, as if to say "don't you realize I'm a male with normal sexual drives standing up here?"

The entire class, including the boys, tittered uncomfortably but also objected vaguely, as if we wondered what right this older male had to make such a comment. This was the 1980s, of course, so we didn't expect any repurcussions; it's hard to imagine a teacher these days making such a comment, even he thought it was true, without some serious blowback. And if he thought it was true, perhaps he should have been focusing more on improving his habits of mind; while you can't control your thoughts and emotions all the time, you can practice a more Buddhist-like attitude of steering your thoughts in certain positive directions, which in turn improves your actions and your life.

I wonder about this teacher's thoughts, actions, and attitudes. He didn't like me very much, because I had a habit of falling asleep in class. The class was right after lunch, and his droning lectures were no match for the effect that lunch of a chicken-supreme sandwich, a peanut-butter bar, and a Coca-Cola had on my system. He would try to embarass me by saying nasty things about my future to wake me up. This of course only tended to make him look petty and make the other students sympathize with me. 

I still did reasonably well in the class, as I recall, at least well enough to place out of the course for my first year of college. It was the 1980s, as I said, so I'm not surprised he did nothing to help me. Teachers were still then, for the most part, largely figures of authority, though of course there were caring and empathetic teachers as well. So the questions are rhetorical, but I wonder why he didn't ask what was wrong with me, question whether I was depressed or getting enough sleep. I wonder (but again, not really) why he didn't take more of an interest in helping me or maybe even just pointing to some resources to help me make better dietary choices and help me to avoid crashing in his class. (Of course, there was never any consideration of the possibility that he was too boring.)

The two memories of a high school versus a college teacher also point to some still-remaining important differences in their roles. College teachers can be caring and should point students to resources when they can, but they don't see the students every day, and they don't know them as well. And the students are older and at least ostensibly adults, so they shoulder more of the responsibility for their own lives and their own academic success (even in a boring class). Dress codes have always struck me as being dangerous in their trivial nature; they presume to fix more than they do and really just continue the K-12 tradition of teaching students to be compliant. Why are we worried about what students are wearing if they aren't learning, and do we really think the distractions of certain clothing choices (or god forbid, long hair) are more important than poor diet or lack of sleep when it comes to learning? Quite obviously, we have done nothing to alter school schedules after compiling decades of evidence that adolescents are not getting enough sleep and should not be going to school at 7 a.m., and in fact we keep piling on the commitments. The only real explanation -- a very poor one -- that I've heard for this lack of change is the fact that it would make the circulation of school buses impossible. 

(Afternote: When I've taught at dual-credit locations in recent years, I've noticed how much more relaxed the dress codes in Texas are these days compared to what they were in my youth. Boys sport beards, and everybody wears shorts. Thank god for that kind of positive progress. Shorts are pretty darn necessary in Houston during certain months. On the other hand, the soda machines and poor food choices remain, as far as I can tell, and now students can bring coffee to school!) 

Sexism, "Two and a Half Men," and Hemingway

I recently came across this 2015 click-bait article offering a list of the "10 most sexist shows on TV." Number 5 on the list, and featured prominently through illustration in the article, is the show Two and a Half Men. Though it's hardly surprising to see this show on the list, I'd suggest that it has more to do with the authors' conflating of the show with the persona and lifestyle of its one-time hedonistic star Charlie Sheen.

(For the record, I've never seen the show without Charlie Sheen, but think it's a pretty funny show most the time. More on that -- what makes it funny -- in another post.) 

The article calls the show "sexist" (misogynistic is used elsewhere in the article) based primarily on the presence of Charlie's stalker-crazy neighbor Rose, the cold and "selfish" mother character, and the parade of short-lived female dates and one-night stands, who are supposedly portrayed as "usually unintelligent and superficial." A similar charge of misogyny is often levied at Hemingway, and I think in both cases it has more to do with our perceptions of Hemingway the private man (who often treated women terribly) and Charlie Sheen (whose life has been raising eyebrows at least since his entanglement with the Heidi Fleiss trial in the 1990s; this fascination with Charlie and the fictionalization of his lifestyle is basically the engine that drives Two and a Half Men and the more cynical but still successful sitcom Anger Management). 

The article misses the point that on "Two and a Half Men," as with just about any sitcom (which lean toward "low" comedy, and that's not an insult), the joke is usually on the main characters. Male characters on sitcoms in particular tend to come off even worse than the women, but in low comedy generally, we are laughing at the main characters as much as we are laughing with them. Contrary to the assertions of the article, many of the "fleeting" female characters on Two and a Half Men (dates with various backgrounds, but also the expected array of waitresses, strippers, stewardesses, etc.) are intelligent, strong-willed, and unwilling to cater to the immaturity of Charlie or to tolerate the annoying qualities of Alan. Charlie and Alan, as they often admit, are the ones with issues, and most of their issues can be traced to a fear of commitment or a tendency to see women in the simplest of terms. They sabotage relationships and spoil good things because they fear the motives and minds of female characters, who they inevitably see in adversarial terms. In other words, yes, the characters can be misogynistic, but that doesn't mean the show itself has that overarching message. 

With Hemingway -- though of course it's more complicated and the comparison is mostly a postmodern dart on the wall -- with the exception of some fantasy-tinged, oversexualized characters, the female characters are often stronger and more human than the sometimes self-hating and self-destructive male characters. Read "Hills Like White Elephants" and decide which of the two only real characters in the story -- the male or female -- come off as more human, more compassionate, more likeable. Hemingway is often showing men at their worst -- pathetic and manipulative, self-defensive in their vulnerability -- and though the male characters don't always get it, it wasn't an accident on Hemingway's part. 

The image from Two and a Half Men featured prominently in the article, of a supposed menage a trois involving Charlie, is actually a shot from a fantasy sequence. Yes, Charlie has an immature and hypersexualized mind, but the females in this case are illusions. The evidence that the mother is unlikeable and hateful is hard to refute, but she's mostly there as a foil, to provide a supposed motivation for the brothers' issues but also so she can repeatedly remind the "boys" that they're grown men who cannot blame their mother forever. This is a positive message for men overall: at some point, it's time to grow up and stop blaming others. But comedy isn't about sending messages as much as it is about laughing at the failures of others -- and also ourselves -- to see what's already in front of them.