Profanity and wasting water (was: Freaks and Geeks)

[Carol]

Kemper wrote:
> 'Fuck' is such a powerful word, so the line seems thin even though it
> exists. <snip>

Carol responds:
Is it? Maybe it used to be, but so did "damn" once upon a time. Both
of them have, IMO, lost all their power and effectiveness through
overuse. It's rather like explicit sex scenes in a novel. After the
first one, they lose all their shock value and hence their
effectiveness. At any rate, when I hear obscenity, vulgarity, and
scatology, I'm completely unimpressed. What hist language needs is
some creative curses. Remember the old song, "May the Bird of Paradise
Fly up Your Nose"? Well, maybe you're too young. IMO, all the use of
four-letter words does is reflect the poverty of the user's
imagination and vocabulary. It shows me that he or she is angry, but
it doesn't make me angry in return, and it certainly doesn't impress
or scare me.

BTW, you said something in another post about water being a renewable
resource. Maybe you haven't been to the desert Southwest, where our
rivers seldom have water in them and our artesian wells are drying out
and collapsing and have to be supplemented with Colorado River water.
Wastewater can be "reclaimed," though much of it goes to waste, and
the water that is "reclaimed" can only be used for irrigation, not for
drinking and bathing. Remember the "hose pipe" ban in OoP? In severe
droughts (as opposed to the normal drought that we're always
suffering), people are fined for watering their lawns and encouraged
to take showers only about twice a week. (No one is fined for breaking
that "rule," of course, but water is a precious resource, and it's
getting scarcer here as the population grows. Too bad Arizona doesn't
have a coastline; maybe we could build a desalinization plant.

Carol, sorry to disagree with Kemper on two points in one post!