Pointless vulgarism of the day:

But first, a joke. Well, part of a much longer elephant joke. Too lazy to type out the whole thing. And yes, I do like elephant jokes for the sheer ridiculousness of the repetition. Erm, anyway. Here's the joke:

How do you get two whales in a Mini?

Along the M4 and across the Severn.

Ok, so how many of you got that? How many of you are in the UK? How many of you are at least of British extraction in some form?

The point (point??? Oh no! PUMPKIN!!!) is that you have to know at least a bit of basic British geography to get that one. I put it in a memo the other week knowing full well that there was probably only one other person on staff that would see why it was even remotely funny.

Sometimes I do things like that. No reason.

----------

If you're wondering what all the harping on Britain has to do with the post title, this is the part where I'm going to tell you. The original title of today's post was going to be Oh, bugger. I forgot to blog. I decided to forego that, though.

Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure now why I changed my mind.

Due in part, no doubt, to my English grandmother (aha. Britain again), bugger is a very regular part of my vocabulary. I've talked about that before on the old blog, but that was the old blog. Besides, things may soon be afoot with the old blog. I'm not saying anything specific, but if there's anything over there that my two fans feel they can't live without they might want to make themselves a copy.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, bugger.

I like bugger. It's very useful. I learned from my book on the history of swearing (yes, I have a book on the history of swearing. You can look that one up on your own, if you're interested. It's findable) that it's also very versatile. It can even be multiple parts of speech if you try hard enough.

It can be quite vulgar as well.

Yep.

I'm aware of that.

Can't say it bothers me, but I am aware of it.

The funny thing to me is that you can often tell people of British background by the way they react to bugger. People who currently live in Britain would be used to hearing it regularly in all its glory, naturally, but I find that even Canadian offspring of Brits are quicker to shrug it off or not even remark it.

I can only speak for Canada in that regard, you know. I'm not from anywhere else, so I wouldn't have a clue about most other places.

Well, except maybe our neighbours to the south.

Have you ever noticed how touchy Americans can be (notice that I say can be rather than are? I'm not trying to paint everyone with the same brush here) about the word bugger? I once made the offhand statement to an American friend that I had "buggered up my ankle" and she looked at me as though she was wondering how that was physically possible.

I doubt she would have even thought twice if I'd used the word screwed instead, but using buggered immediately sent her straight to sodomy.




Um, not literally. That would have been an uncomfortable moment.

I'd go into this more, but at the moment I need to get back to work more than I need to talk about international cursing. I'll just say, then, as a Canadian who's fairly used to translating British to American and vice versa, I get a kick out of seeing what unexpectedly upsets whom.

It's fun.






One Pika interruption later, and I've completely forgotten what else I was going to say. Just as well.

It probably would have just been bugger anyway. Or something like that.