1
" Fuck You Poem #45Fuck you in slang and conventional English.Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes.Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked, and defaced.Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste.Fuck you with rosemary and thyme, and fried green olives on the side.Fuck you humidly and icily.Fuck you farsightedly and blindly.Fuck you nude and draped in stolen finery.Fuck you while cells divide wildly and birds trill.Thank you for barring me from his bedside while he was ill.Fuck you puce and chartreuse.Fuck you postmodern and prehistoric.Fuck you under the influence of opiun, codeine, laudanum, and paregoric.Fuck every real and imagined country you fancied yourself princess of.Fuck you on feast days and fast days, below and above.Fuck you sleepless and shaking for nineteen nights running.Fuck you ugly and fuck you stunning.Fuck you shipwrecked on the barren island of your bed.Fuck you marching in lockstep in the ranks of the dead.Fuck you at low and high tide.And fuck you astride anyone who has the bad luck to fuck you, in dank hallways, bathrooms, or kitchens.Fuck you in gasps and whispered benedictions.And fuck these curses, however heartfelt and true,that bind me, till I forgive you, to you. "
10
" Well,' said Can o' Beans, a bit hesitantly,' imprecise speech is one of the major causes of mental illness in human beings.'
Huh?'
Quite so. The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.'
The manner in which the other were regarding him/her made Can O' Beans feel compelled to continue. 'The word neat, for example, has precise connotations. Neat means tidy, orderly, well-groomed. It's a valuable tool for describing the appearance of a room, a hairdo, or a manuscript. When it's generically and inappropriately applied, though, as it is in the slang aspect, it only obscures the true nature of the thing or feeling that it's supposed to be representing. It's turned into a sponge word. You can wring meanings out of it by the bucketful--and never know which one is right. When a person says a movie is 'neat,' does he mean that it's funny or tragic or thrilling or romantic, does he mean that the cinematography is beautiful, the acting heartfelt, the script intelligent, the direction deft, or the leading lady has cleavage to die for? Slang possesses an economy, an immediacy that's attractive, all right, but it devalues experience by standardizing and fuzzing it. It hangs between humanity and the real world like a . . . a veil. Slang just makes people more stupid, that's all, and stupidity eventually makes them crazy. I'd hate to ever see that kind of craziness rub off onto objects. "
― Tom Robbins , Skinny Legs and All
12
" Is language actually getting better, shorter, and easier? Nowadays we often hear exactly the opposite. Teenager slang is awful, students no longer learn Latin, our children — not to mention our president — cannot put together a grammatical sentence. The whimsical poet Ogden Nash was at least half serious in his “Laments for a dying language”:
Coin brassy words at will, debase the coinage;
We're in an if-you-cannot-lick-them-join age,
A slovenliness-provides-its-own-excuse age,
Where usage overnight condones misusage.
Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,
Once English, now a vile orangutanguage. "
― , The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
15
" I remember the very day, sometime during the first two weeks of my five-year amorous sojourn in Brutland, when I was made privy to one of the most arcane of their utterings. The time was ripe for that major epiphany, my initiation into the sacred knowledge—or should I say gnosis?—of that all-important, quintessentially Brutish slang term, the word that endless hours of scholastic education by renowned mentors, plus years of scrupulous scrutiny into scrofulous texts, had disappointingly failed to impart to me, leaving me with that deep sense of emptiness begotten by hemimathy; the time was finally ripe for me to be transported by the velvety feel of the unvoiced palato-alveolar fricative, the élan of the unpronounceable and masochistically hedonistic front open-rounded vowel, and, last but not least, the (admittedly short) ejaculatory quality of the voiced velar stop: all three of them combined together to form that miraculous lexical item, the word shag. "