Replacing Naughty Words

July 14, 2021February 28, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“What is funny?” I asked the laughers at the tail end of our discussion. “Glenn just said he went to the post office, and the clerk didn’t give him enough stamps. Why is that funny?” If the laughers were honest, they would say, “I don’t know.” If they study the rhythms and beats of humor to the point that they drain all of the fun out of it, they know it’s all about the swear words. “If I told the exact same story without the swear words, do you think it would be just as funny?” Everyone knows the answer but no one wants to say.

Some will venture into the field with an, “Spare me your outrage.” When I clarified that I’m not interested in the moral quality of the joke, “I’m only interested in your definition of humor.” The guy knew me and my peculiar focus on tone, word choices, and emphasis, so he backed away from the charge. “I’m fascinated with how you think a story is funny when a Glenn drops swear words into it, and Mary doesn’t.”

“When Glenn complains, his complaints are the same as ours,” I added, “but we give more weight to Glenn’s complaints, because he swears.”

“He just tells it like it is,” someone said.

The obsessive language nerd, who studies the effects and affects of swear words, knows swear words are one of the best vehicles we’ve ever invented to properly convey exaggerated emotions, and hard-core truths. As George Carlin once said, “They offer excellent punctuation.”

We don’t know much about linguistics, but we know our swears, naughty words, and vulgarity. We know them, we love them, and they are ours in a way that defines us, as much as we define them. We didn’t know a whole lot about them when we were younger, but we were eager to meet them. And when our rascally uncle Jim introduced us to them, we laughed harder than anyone in the room, because we wanted him to think we were all too familiar with them. We also thought our uncle Jim was the coolest person in the room, because he wasn’t afraid to swear in front of children. We thought that meant he was treating us like adults, and we loved him for it.

Repetition eventually breeds familiarity, yet we know nothing about their history. We don’t care where they came from or how old they are, and we still don’t. We might grow to know a lot about how to use them now, how they permeate and penetrate, but most of us have no idea that our favorite swears are probably the same ones our authority figures used to tell their authority figures off. Depending on our age, they might be the same words that our great-grandfather used to tell his authority figures off. Does that matter? It doesn’t. They may have been theirs then, but they’re ours now.

We don’t rent them, or lease them with a plan to buy. We own them. Yet, when we assumed ownership, we didn’t look under the hood, examine the tires for wear, or notice the ‘as is’ sticker. They felt new to us, or new enough. The idea that they were used didn’t matter to us then, and it doesn’t matter to us now, because they’re ours now, and putting our own miles on them provides intrinsic ownership qualities.

We use these words to shock and offend our authority figures into recognizing that we’ve arrived, and we have some power now. We want them to know that we know these words now, and we’re not afraid to use them anymore. We find these words rebellious and liberating, and we plan to use them in a manner our parents have never heard before. Check that, we know they’ve probably heard them before, but they’ve never heard us say them, not like this … (kapow!) We’re not afraid to use these words to inform them that we now reject everything they hold dear, and we’re no longer afraid to violate how they once viewed us. We might understand, on some level, that their provocative nature contains evergreen qualities, but does the idea that our grandparents knew them, and probably used them in the same shocking, offensive manner give the words more power or less? Is it all about their provocative, shocking qualities, or does it have something to do with the foundational familiarities that we all have with them?

That bomb you just dropped on your mom to express your intense rebellion to her matriarchal constructs was probably the same word she used on her mother to try to accomplish the same thing. When we attempt to shock her with our provocative use of offensive words, are we smashing the matriarchy, or are we carrying on a family tradition?

We have a relationship with these words, and we know our relationship isn’t monogamous. We’ll use whatever word comes to mind to suit our needs, and we don’t mind it when someone else uses and abuses them in the same manner. We might even bond with that straight-laced, church-girl, from a neighboring cubicle, who just causally dropped a big bombastic word on her co-worker. “I didn’t know you cussed,” we say, leaning over the cubicle wall with a gleam in our eye. Now, we may not become besties over one swear word, but it could open the door to respect that could lead to a level of bonding that probably wouldn’t have happened without that swear word.

Dropping the perfect swear word in the perfect place, with learned intonation, can also provide excellent punctuation. Proper usage can garner the attention and adulation from those listening to an otherwise boring story about our trip to the post office. They can provide an interesting or funny comma, if we know how to pound our point home with a more offensive and exciting exclamation point. The proper technique involves a one-step, two-step, shock, shock, shock! series of steps that we should follow with a casual, blasé open turn that suggests this isn’t half as meaningful to us as it is to you.

I have an almost inbred need to seek the countervailing winds, and when I saw everyone begin swearing as often as they could, I joined in. Hey, even a rebel needs to fit in when we’re all young and vulnerable, and we need them to pay attention to us, and we savor their laughter.

I learned the way of the words from a sweaty, greazy, and hairy Gary who worked the line at a restaurant where we worked. Gary was twenty-five, I was fifteen, and in our little world, he was the master chef of comedy. Yet, Gary’s recipe of comedy was so effortless that it appeared almost unintentional. He had some unique internal wiring I’ve only met a few times since that could make a trip to the post office to buy stamps not just funny, but knee-slapping hilarious, and he, and his stories were not vulgar-reliant.

Gary swore, but he used them as a master chef might use paprika or oregano, knowing how powerful a subtle burst of flavor can be when using them as a topical ingredient, or garnish. The problem for the rest of us is that once we develop a taste for spice, we can’t help but add so much that we all but kill the meal. When it became obvious to me that few of my peers followed Gary’s recipe of subtle, judicious use of spicing, I noticed that swearing in a joke or story was not just expected but required for laughter, and I began to reevaluate.

The Reevaluations

Having a child led to another level of reevaluation. If we don’t want to hear swear words coming out of their mouth, we have to be more careful about what words we use around them. Some don’t agree.

“It’s a word,” parents, say. “I can think of a thousand other things, right here and now, that I don’t want to hear coming out of their mouth. That was just a word. Quit being so stuffy.”

In this second reevaluation, I became more aware of the situation specific nature of my lewd lexicon. If we’re building something with our kid, and we hammer our index finger, what do we say to effectively express our temporary but excruciating pain? If we experience situations that call for exaggerated emotions of urgency, anger, disappointment and frustration, how do we express these exaggerated emotions if we’re not going to swear? How do we move our audience in an offensive way to properly convey disdain, and inform the world that we have a painful bobo, if we’re not going to swear? If we’ve ever had such discussions with ourselves, we’ll realize that we’ve been cursing and swearing so often and for so long that somewhere along the line we became vulgar reliant. When this need to express ourselves meets our desire to influence others through language, we realize that we need to fill our situation-specific gaps with something.

My solution was to sarcastically invent my own swear words to convey these emotions. Some, like fooey monsters and fudge nuggets, worked, but most didn’t. In the midst of this pursuit (which increased tenfold when the offspring, my little demon, announced his entry into the world), it dawned on me that playful substitutes always hit roadblocks.

I never considered the value of swear words, until I tried to introduce playful substitutes, but I found that traditional swear words provide pitch-perfect stress that we need to provoke and offend. It’s the way of the words. In order to replace the traditionally shocking and offensive words, I realized we need replacements that can shock or offend slightly before the confusion sets in. Even as I was playing with this whole dynamic, I realized the the words I would use needed to be spat in anger, disgust, or whatever emotion I deemed specific to punctuate that situation to lead everyone within earshot to recognize my reaction. To arrive at a suitable replacement, I knew I needed to study the irreplaceable swear words our ancestors chose to convey emotions.

The study was brief and not very thorough, but I found that most of these words are so much older than we thought. The next thing we find, when we try to invent new, offensive words, is that our ancestors obviously knew what they were doing when they chose those offensive, therapeutic, and therapeutically offensive words. For some reason, using hard consonants, such as a hard (‘F’), an enunciated (‘T’), or the unpleasant (‘K’) sounds, work surprisingly well in certain situations. The (‘K’), in particular, can prove to be quite the crowd-pleaser, if we hit it hard and hold it for a second.

I don’t know if it’s all about the ingrained tradition of seeing and hearing older, cooler kids use them so often that we copied them, or if it has something to do with the machinations occurring in the back office of our brain, but it just feels a little better to yell a word that begins with a hard (‘F’) that is punctuated with a hard (‘K’) when we accidentally strike our index finger with a hammer.

We also discover some of their internal, medicinal benefits, when a lover dumps us. It feels so good to tell our friends what we called our ex- a name that they agree is excessive and deliciously harsh on his way out, so everyone will view it as retribution for everything he did to us. If we do it right, our friends might even give us a high-five.

“So, he dumped you on the curb, like a sack of rancid cranberries, and you called him a name?” I asked her, sitting between the two parties, “And you think you’re even now?”

The Indelicate Index

There are so many different, and somewhat boring, theories on the etymologies of these words. Some suggest the origins are very specific, and that the power and definitions simply snowballed over time. Others suggest that they started from vague and difficult to determine origins. No matter what I read in my research, I concluded each reading with a big, fat “Who cares?” Who cares what they meant in Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, or whatever sources of antiquity the researchers discovered. If our ancestors didn’t really know what they were doing, and these words were, for whatever reason, chosen at random, it just doesn’t matter now. The only thing that matters now is what matters now, because we’ve built our own iconographic walls around these words.

Most of us don’t remember the first time we heard our first swear word, but we remember hearing them at their best … at the movies. The scripts that called for the actors to say something awful to punctuate their acts of violence were so cool. We can try to diminish their effect, as we age, and we can say, “That seems so 6^th grade now,” but we cannot deny how cool it was when we were in 6^th grade. “That swear word punctuated that scene so well, and they were so pitch-perfect that I gotta get that in my next situation.”

Do you remember that first time you told that perfect joke that involved the perfect swear word? I tried it early on, and no one laughed. Why? I don’t know, but I think it had something to do with the idea that I sounded like a little kid trying to use swear words for the first time. I learned, through trial and error, how to perfect my tones and stresses, until I eventually learned how to upgrade a relatively adequate joke into the perfect joke. I did it in front of my uncle Jim and his friend, and their laughter made me feel like I finally arrived. I’ll never forget that feeling.

Some jokes and stories just don’t feel complete without quality swear words peppered throughout, particularly in the punch line. We develop a personal history with these words that feels so intimate they’re almost familial. If we feel a need to replace them how would we do it without relying too much on the tried and tested models?

We so remember the first time we dropped a big one on our primary authority figure, because we felt a peculiar sensation that is difficult to describe. We know that that sensation was all about power though. We gave them a small, knowing smile that would have made you proud, and with that, we made an announcement that “We don’t care anymore. We’re no longer children. We now have these words in our arsenal, and we’re not afraid to use them.” We learned that the strategic use of profanity can turn a period into an exclamation point. We also learned how to use tones, rhythms, and stresses to maximum effect. Then, we learned the proper facial expression to wear when delivering a haymaker to rattle our ancestors down to their foundation. We learned how to convey emotions early on when no one took us seriously, by learning how to articulate swears!

After we discovered how to use these words properly, we discovered that using profanity also requires a level of balance. When our goal is displaying a rebellious truth, too much energy and too much intent can shift the balance of power in such a way that dilutes our meaning. When we swear, we hope to vent, as opposed to internalizing our anger, but doing so too often can lead to laughter, as it shows the profane character might not have the confidence to know when and how to use profanity properly. If swearing provides excellent punctuation, in other words, excessive punctuation can lead to a clumsy presentation. The power of profanity, we find, comes with great responsibility. Excessive profanity can also lead the audience to believe the speaker is profane, and thereby unable to properly express themselves due to a lack of quality education. As we age, we learn that Gary the line cook was right on the mark, swearing should be oregano and paprika, as opposed to the main course.

The Dysphemism Treadmill

It doesn’t matter how awful the swear word is, every single one of them will eventually run its course, individually, culturally, even sociopolitically. Our individual experience is such that we enjoy saying and hearing these words, as they define our breakout, we incorporate them into our lexicon, and we expect our peers to also do so, until we arrive at a place where everyone we know expresses themselves through a variety of the same situation-specific swear words. The selection of certain swear words eventually becomes so agreed upon that it’s expected, and when it becomes expected, it becomes commonplace.

Someone far smarter than the author of Rilaly.com developed a term for this cyclical experience that he called the dysphemism treadmill. The dysphemism treadmill, as opposed to Steven Pinker’s euphemism treadmill, suggests that what we consider profane in one frame eventually becomes commonplace. A euphemism is an innocuous word used to replace a derogatory term, a dysphemism, by contrast, is a derogatory expression. The use of the treadmill suggests that a profane word has a life cycle for each party involved. They/we regard it as an offensive taboo in the beginning, with a here, there be dragons designation, until it becomes so commonplace among our peers, and in the culture, that we begin to use it. At some point further down the road, it becomes so commonplace that extensive use drains it of any power it once wielded. Then, I add, when our kids use these terms, and use them against us, they start the cycle all over again. It’s the dysphemism treadmill. Prior generations started this cycle, we joined it, and the next one will too.

We probably didn’t know someone developed a term for it, but we know it when we see it. We hear it too, until we don’t hear it. When we’re younger, and we hear people swear in movies or TV, it’s exciting, fun, and funny. “He just said, what?” LAUGHTER “Yay!” “That movie had seven swears, two ‘F’ bombs, an MF, and four ‘S’ words!” The older we get, the older they get, until they go from an acceptable form of communication to commonplace, to a final stage where we don’t even hear them anymore. The kid was in bed but obviously not asleep in the back bedroom. The next day, he reported that he heard “everything they said” on the TV show we were watching. What did everything mean? “They said some awful awful things.” It shocked us, because we didn’t hear it, because we don’t hear it anymore. It goes in one ear and out the other. It’s such an accepted form of communication for us now that we don’t know if we still consider using offensive language a question of morality anymore, but we do not want our children hearing such language from us.

“Well, he’s gonna hear it somewhere,” people reflexively say whenever they accidentally swear in front of our kids.

“And I think we both know, there’s nothing I can do about that,” I reply. “I can only control what I can control. I cannot control what he hears at school, or among his friends. I have some control over the shows he watches, but I recognize the limits there too. I can only control what I can control, and as his primary influence in life, I can control my language when I’m around him, and you can too, Grandpa!” When his friends say them, it’s funny, naughty and rebellious. When parents say them, however, it can lead to a premature sense of commonplace on their treadmill, and they’ll learn to use those words accordingly. I also think language is a staple of youth, and by cleaning up my language when I’m around him, it might help make some small, seemingly insignificant elements of his youth last just a little bit longer. My meager efforts in this regard might be so relative as to be insignificant, but as they say every little bit helps.

Hundreds of Years Old

Those who study the origin of words suggest that some of the words, most famously listed in George Carlin’s Seven Words you can Never say on Television, are at least hundreds of years old. They question whether these words had the profane power they do now, but they state that the words are a lot older than most would believe. My guess is that this study was put forth to suggest that these words aren’t that bad, and I would flip that around and say, “Words don’t have power, until we assign them power. If they’re not that bad, why are they our go-to when we’re extremely angry, frustrated, and sad? Why do we use them on a sliding scale to properly convey extremes, if they aren’t that bad?”

When they suggest that they didn’t have the same power hundreds of years ago, in Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s day, I cede that notion, but they’re currently as powerful as they were in the 60s and 70s when standup comedian Lenny Bruce was getting arrested for saying them on stage, and when George Carlin wrote the Seven Words you can Never say on Television. Did my great-grandpa use one of these words when he hammered a finger, probably not, but I’m pretty sure my grandpa either used them or tried to avoid using them based on the power they amassed in his era. So, the modern young people who want to carry on the tradition of burning everything that came before them to prepare the world for their new generation are probably using the same naughty words that their grandmothers and grandfathers, or great-grandparents, from the 60s and 70s, used in similar situations.

Put in that frame, it’s noteworthy that no generation, after the mid 60s to the early 70s generation, took the taboo to another level. Those who used foul language from the Carlin/Bruce generation expressed themselves in a radical manner, and audiences walked out on their shows aghast and shocked at the profanity they used in their shows. Does that still happen?

Young people and teenagers might still be fascinated with offensive language, but adults place them on the commonplace portion of the treadmill. They don’t leave these shows, they aren’t offended anymore, and they’re probably in the same place I am in hearing these words so often that they don’t even hear them anymore. We obliterated those taboos so often that the trend in modern, comedic movies that the taboo progressed to swearing in front of children, and that only happened after the little old lady with a foul mouth ran its course. When swearing in front of children ran its course in comedic movies, they moved with the taboo to having children swear in movies. It’s the dysphemism treadmill.

Bruce and Carlin not only expressed themselves with profanity regardless what “the man” said, they fought any and all censorship of expression, and they faced legal consequences for doing so. Some might call them trailblazers, but when that generation crossed the Rubicon of thirty years of age, and they became parents, why did the next generation follow the exact same trail they blazed? Most generations speak of torching the trail of the previous generation, to build a new one, rather than follow it obediently. Why did the successive generations copy these particular words for future use?

A Profane Concept

Are the concepts behind vulgar and profane words so revolutionary that they’re evergreen and immune to change? If an enterprising social critic started trying to change the fabric by using new and different words to offend and shock parents, would they be laughed out of the building? How could anyone update such concepts? What words would they use to better, or uniquely, describe lewd activities and disgusting bodily functions without being subject to ridicule? It would be an almost impossible chore, but the one thing we love about enterprising young souls is their ability to make the impossible possible.

The avenue to doing it in such a way that reaches young people, now, would be through YouTube. The first question this provocateur would have to answer is why do it? Is there some financial reward for changing the language in this manner? The second question would be why do it? Curse words are beloved in their own way, and they’re familiar. If we are going to revamp, revolutionize, or just tweak the lewd lexicon, we better prepare for the backlash.

“I’m not giving up on my swear words that easily,” a YouTube commenter, named Smurfette’s Rainbow, adds in the reply section. “They’ve served me well in moments of frustration and angst, and they have managed to make some of my otherwise lame jokes pretty (expletive deleted) funny.”

If the influencer wanted to provide proper alternatives, he would need to understand the science of swear words. Among the many things they find will be the psychologically pleasing, offensive qualities of certain hard consonants. The hard (‘F’) is the most obvious consonant to use, but they would also have to incorporate hard (‘T’s) and (‘K’s) in their new words. They would also have to abide by our need for syllables. A simple expression of anger requires one hard consonant syllable, but an elevated level of anger requires three, sometimes four syllables to properly express ourselves, and these revolutionaries would have to be mindful of that.

“The best swear words I’ve found have hard consonants,” the influencer might say, soon after he lays out his mission in the intro. “Spraken ze Deutch (German for do you speak German?), for example, is one of my favorites. After listening to German friends of mine speak, I realized that many German phrases make great cuss words, because almost all German phrases have hard consonants. Try it out the next time you drive a hammer into your thumb. Spraken ze Deutch. There are probably too many syllables for required punctuation, but I think you’ll find using it in some contexts quite therapeutic.”

“My friends simply won’t accept any of the alternatives you’ve listed here,” Tripping the Light Fantastic replies in the comments section, “and I don’t care how many hard consonants or syllables you mix in. Our reputations are on the line here fella. Why don’t you go mess with someone else’s vocab (insert influencer’s name). We got nothing for you here.”

“How are we supposed to tone these words?” a third, somewhat eager commentator, named Fertilizer Spikes, asks. “You provide us with some situations, and I appreciate that, but we need more situations, so our tones suit the situation better. I’m all for introducing a new paradigm, through a new set of swear words that describe reproduction, our reproductive organs, and the movement of our bowels, but you have to remember how many years of practice it took us to learn how to use and tone the more traditional swear words properly.”

“You’re right, Fertilizer Spikes,” Uncle Shemp agrees, “swearing isn’t innate. It’s learned behavior, and our influencer here doesn’t seem to recognize that.”

As with all efforts of this sort, this first influencer would probably hit an epic fail, as their audience might view it as some sort of spoof ridiculousness. His failure wouldn’t be absolute however, as he would sprinkle the seeds for the second influential voice to take the baton. The second enterprising young entrepreneur might follow many of the steps laid out for the first, but he would find a unique, individualistic way of offending the other generations. Some guys are just offensive. We don’t know why, and we don’t know how they do, but our parents say, “I just don’t like him.” That’s the type of guy who could convince the next generation that his words are the “new words you cannot say.” It would likely have to start out tongue-in-cheek, but if they do it right everyone will be using the words and repeating them, whether they get it or not. How many movements started out a joke that accidentally caught on? What if the next generation believed their parents genuinely found words like “Funderbunk!” or “Fudge Crackers!” offensive? What if it caught on so well that they used one of the second influencer’s words when they hit their index finger with a hammer? Let the revolution begin!

The first answer to “Why do it?” can be answered by typing the word of choice in a search engine followed by “How old is it?” Once we learn that these words were probably used by famous radio broadcasters, before the advent of TV, wouldn’t that characterize future use as redundant? The moment after my dad or my grandma informed me that they liked a musician or band I did was the last time I “officially” listened to them. I hated meatloaf growing up, butter brickle ice cream, Neapolitan ice cream, and anything and everything my dad liked. I did not set out to loathe everything my dad liked, it was just what I did, and it’s just what we do when we’re carving out our own identity. This might fall under the umbrella of rebellion, because it is, but we don’t do it with righteous fists held high. It’s just kind of what we do. Yet, if their brand of music makes our skin crawl, and the sight of butter brickle ice cream and those little neapolitan ice cream bars causes us to gag almost involuntarily, because they remind us of our parents, why doesn’t their vulgarity have the same effect on us? We do everything we can to be different from our parents when we’re young, and we consider our grandparents so irrelevant that they’re not even worth rebelling against. Yet we still use the swear words they used when swearing at the three channels they watched on black and white TVs. When we’re brand new adults, we’re dying to break the shackles of the matriarchal and patriarchal constructs that define and confine us, so why are we still using the same offensive words to shock our ancestors with the same taboo language that they used to shock theirs?

An Hungarian Goose

July 9, 2021June 25, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“Listen Daphne,” the character Frasier Crane said, in an episode called We Two Kings, episode ten of season ten, “is your mom partial to a traditional Cornwall dressing, you see I’m thinking it would go splendidly with the twelve-pound Hungarian goose that I’m serving,” he adds the latter with a excited survey of the room to encourage joy.

Niles and Daphne counter that they are planning on celebrating Christmas at their apartment to celebrate their first Christmas as a married couple, and they invite Frasier to partake in their celebration. Frasier argued that it’s been a Crane family tradition to have Christmas at his place. To which, Niles responds:

“Frasier you’ve had Christmas for the past nine years.”

“Yes, but we agreed we’d have Christmas here in its traditional setting.”

“Yeah, well, maybe it’s time to start a new tradition,” Niles says.

“But I’ve had new stockings loomed for everyone,” Frasier says. “Now there you see, you made me spoil the surprise, and did no one hear me say that I have ordered an Hungarian goose?”

As is typical of Kelsey Grammer, he delivers a pitch perfect line. He stresses the word (‘an’), and he punctuates the word goose with a pleading tone that asks his audience (Niles and Daphne) to recognize the import of what he’s saying. We don’t know how many takes Grammer used to hit that line that perfect, but the finished product will live on in television history as far as I’m concerned, as one of the best one-liners Grammer ever delivered.

Some proper grammar enthusiasts might argue that Grammer used improper grammar when he issued this historically hysterical line in the situation comedy Frasier. The grammatically correct use of definitive articles states that we use (‘a’) before vowels and an (‘an’) before consonants, but as with everything in the English language, there are exceptions. The letter (‘H’) is just such an exception. When the (‘H’) is silent, as it is in the word hour, we use (‘an’) even though (‘H’) is a consonant. “It will only take me an hour to complete this article.” If the (‘H’) is pronounced, as in “I always wear a hat when I write”, (‘a’) is the proper definite article to use. The exception to the (‘H’) exception occurs when the accent is not on the first syllable of a word, because the pronunciation of the (‘H’) is downplayed in words where the accentuation occurs after the first syllable, and it renders it closer to the silent (‘H’) rule. Unless, they argue, we’re using some words like historian or habitual, in which (‘a’) is the preferred variant.

We also have other exceptions regarding the sound in certain other words. We don’t say “He has a MBA”, for example, because it sounds like a (‘E’) exists before the (‘M’), or (em-bee-ay). It just sounds wrong to say a MBA, even though the initials begin with an (‘M’). So, the rule states that if it sounds like a vowel precedes the consonant, then we use the definitive article (’an’).

One rule of thumb on the use of definitive articles, says June Casagrande, from The Glendale Newspress, “[I]t’s a mistake to choose based on anything but sound.” So, if it sounds wrong, it probably is? Well, (‘an’) Hungarian goose doesn’t sound correct, even if the stress is found on the second syllable, and if we extend Ms. Casagrande’s quote out to other strict to casual rules of usage, so many of them just don’t sound correct.

Anytime I sort through the rules of grammar and spelling as it pertains to the English language, I think of two people: a foreigner I knew well who told me that English might be the hardest language in the world to speak on a casual level. “I did well in my ESL (English as a Second Language) class,” she said, “but talking to English speakers in this country is so confusing. There are so many exceptions and rules, even in casual conversation, that I just want to pull my hair out. Talking to you, a writer who obsesses over such rules, is even more nerve-wracking. I don’t think I’ll ever get it,” the woman, who speaks seven other languages to near fluency, told me. The other person I think of is Norm MacDonald who, when confronted with the idea that the English language might be one of the hardest languages to learn, he said, “Really, because I think it’s pretty easy.”

Was Kelsey Grammer grammatically correct when he said the line, “An Hungarian Goose”? The Word check program I’m using to write this article suggests that the definitive article (‘an’) is incorrect in this case. Yet it allows me to write both ‘a historian’ and ‘an historian’ without notification of error. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but the stress on Hungarian falls on the second (gar) syllable, and if that’s the case doesn’t it render the (‘H’) equivalent to silent in the phrase and an (‘an’) is more correct in this case?” signed Confused.

On the surface, it appears that only skilled comedians and comedic actors can explain why some words are funnier than others. They don’t know squat, I suggest, until they try it out. Standup comedians test their material constantly, and comedic actors sort through their numerous takes, with directors and writers, to find the right sentence, the perfect pitch, and everything else that produces a finished product to which we marvel. We can only wonder how many takes it took Grammer to try to hit that line perfect, but when he hit a hard (‘an’) in the line and punctuated the word goose with a distinct plea in his voice, I think it was as close to comedic perfection as the skilled comedic actor ever achieved. Steve Martin suggests that comedy is similar to music in that what works in comedy is often based on rhythms and beats. In this frame, the syllables involved in the words an Hungarian goose are funnier than Danish hen ever could be, even if Grammer dropped the line in the exact same manner. So, if anyone who wants to debate whether Grammer should’ve said (‘a’) Hungarian goose, I would introduce them to another exception to the rule, and I regard this an exception to all rules of usage in the English language, “If it works, and it’s that funny, you can go ahead and throw all of your rules of usage right out the window.

Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci

July 8, 2021January 30, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

“If you love that book on Van Gogh that much, you should try reading Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci,” I told a person who was pitching a Vincent Van Gogh book to me. I normally don’t care for people who say, “You think that’s great, you should try this,” but I was so enamored with Isaacson’s book that I couldn’t keep quiet about it.

“At some point in his younger years, da Vinci probably saw someone paint most beautiful eyes he ever saw. At some point, he probably saw someone paint the most enigmatic smile ever created, and he had to top them,” I said. “Either that, or he saw the extent of his talent at some point in his life, and he wanted to go deeper to better understand what he wanted to portray.

“However he arrived at this point, Leonardo da Vinci became an artist who could no longer just paint a smile. He couldn’t just paint eyes. He wanted, needed, to understand the inner machinations of the muscles and tendons involved in the smile and the mechanics of the eye to make them appear as alive and realistic as possible. Due to constraints of his era, he had to hire grave robbers to exhume bodies for him (some suggest he ended up carving up thirty bodies), so he could dissect them to help him understand our anatomy on a deeper level to understand how these components of our face worked together to form something as complex as a smile. In the early years of this pursuit, the grave robbing had to occur under the cover of night, because it was deemed illegal by the Catholic Church to dissect a human body, unless it was being performed by a qualified physician.

Da Vinci had to go deeper into channels that you and I would never consider to perfect his brand of visual manipulation that might lead us believe that the eyes were following us around a room. Leonardo’s methodology was that the difference between a talented artist, and one who seeks perfection is not the big things, it’s all the little, insignificant things that you and I would never consider. “It is necessary for a painter to be a good anatomist,” da Vinci wrote, “so that he may be able to design the naked parts of the human frame and know the anatomy of the sinews, nerves, bones, and muscles.”

“Oh my gosh,” my Vincent van Gogh loving friend said. “I had no idea, and I’m an art enthusiast. I’ll bet most people who haven’t read that book don’t know that.”

“His work on these cadavers was in service of his art,” I added, “but he became so obsessed with it that my guess is that much of what he uncovered was useless to him professionally. He might have started this process in service to his art, but I’m guessing that his curiosity overwhelmed him when he started finding answers. I’m guessing that he carved up the first cadaver to find an answer, then he found it, and he dug deeper and found other answers to questions he never asked before. He found some answers to irrelevant minutiae that intrigued him so much, and he became so obsessed that he probably forgot the original reason he paid the grave robbers to exhume bodies, and he became less of an artist seeking answers to artistic questions and more of a scientist.”

The latter was an opinion that Isaacson would correct. “Da Vinci was never less of one or more of another. He sought to infuse science and math into his art. From the anatomical perfection he sought in the Mona Lisa to the mathematics of perspective he used in The Last Supper, da Vinci was always seeking a hybrid of the three.”

“The point,” I would counter, “is there had to be a point of origin for his fascination with science and math. If there wasn’t, if he was always fascinated with science and math, there had to be a point where he decided to incorporate these disciplines into his grand visions of art. I understand that he eventually achieved a hybrid, but there had to be a point where he said if I’m going to realistically portray water flow, I need to gain firsthand experience and knowledge. In doing so, he was so fascinated with his findings that he forgot to complete the paintings he was commissioned to complete.”

Some say that Leonardo da Vinci was such a curious person that he made it his goal to ask himself one hundred questions a day. You’ll note that it wasn’t necessarily his goal to find one hundred answers a day, though that was, of course, part of it. Those who love da Vinci suggest that he thought questions led to other questions, and that if he asked enough questions they might lead to other questions, until he arrived at an answer to a question he never considered before. Da Vinci’s was an ego-less approach to problem solving that most of us can’t do without attaching our questions to personal beliefs, conventional wisdoms, and other such biases. My guess is da Vinci kept asking himself questions to attempt to drain them of any personal convictions he might have on a subject. Then when he arrived at answers, he immediately went about trying to disprove them. He didn’t invent the step we now include in the scientific method, but he turned the practice into an artform in his own pursuits.

When Leonardo da Vinci approached something as simple as water flow, we can guess that by the time he seriously sat down to understand it, he had all of the conventional thoughts of the day running around in his head. He probably read as many books on it as were available to him at the time (if there were any), and he talked to any experts he could find whom he considered far more intelligent than he. At some point, he either thought they were all wrong on the subject, or he felt he needed to verify their answers for himself. Either way, Isaacson details some of the observations da Vinci made, and some of the experiments he conducted to understand it better. Da Vinci wasn’t the first to study water, of course, nor was he the last, but we have to believe that he was one of the few. We have to imagine that few have endured the hours, or an accumulation of months and probably years trying to understand it, because it comes equipped with one powerful deterrent: it’s boring. Even before the advent of radio, TV, the internet, and smartphones gave us all something to do to stave off boredom, studying water had to be pretty low on the list of things for anyone to do on otherwise boring Saturday afternoon. How much time did da Vinci sit outside watching water, how much time did he spend conducting experiments to understand the true nature of water? How much of his life did he devote to trying to arrive at an answer that no one would ever care about, even if he did publish his findings? Even if all he did was accurately portray the flow of water in one of his paintings, it probably only satisfied da Vinci and a small cadre of art enthusiasts who focus on the tiny minutiae that separates the talented from the brilliant. How many of his patrons would recognize such minute detail, and laud him for it? Was there anything more than a personal reward for the laborious study he put into making sure a couple of brushstrokes were accurately portraying what he discovered to be a truth about water? The only thing more boring than studying water to find the greater truths about it, as Isaacson’s book illustrates, is reading about it.

Perhaps the only interesting element of da Vinci’s study of water is why was he inspired to pursue it when many considered the topic so thoroughly explored? At what point do relatively uninformed people become so informed that they are confident enough to question the conventional information of their esteemed peers on a subject? We can only guess that he was intimidated by the experts’ intellect in his formative years, but he progressed beyond that. We all go through these progressions in varying ways. We all accept what our parents say as fact, but we begin to question them when at a certain age. Our parents are our primary authority figures, for much of our lives, and they’re our go-to for answers. When we find out they’re wrong on some things, we naturally assume they’re wrong about everything. We know our parents, and we know their vulnerabilities. Most experts’ vulnerabilities are not as available to us, so we cede authority of a subject to them on the subject to which they claim authority. Some of us don’t. Some of us, such as Leonardo da Vinci, don’t pursue knowledge to prove anyone wrong, but we find intimacy with the truth when we investigate a matter for ourselves.

The questions da Vinci had about water were probably just as numerous as the ones he had about achieving flight, nature, and the numerous other answers to such detailed questions that no one, in his time, had ever asked before. Thus, a number of his findings were so far ahead of their time that when we eventually discovered his journals, and we deciphered them in a mirror, because he wrote them backwards, we discovered advances he made that were centuries prior to the same ones made by renowned scientists. As Momento Artem writes in The Clocktower, “It’s believed that if [da Vinci] released [his journals] during his lifetime, they would not only have changed renaissance science and medicine but also the scientific and medical worlds we have today.”

How many people died as a result of a procedure called bloodletting? If da Vinci released his journals on the heart, and his subsequent theories on blood flow, during his lifetime, or we discovered them sooner, they might have disproven the theories behind bloodletting and spared the millions of patients who followed the useless and hopeless pain of the procedure.”

Knowledge can be a powerful thing. It can ingratiate people to us, in a “I can’t believe you know that” frame, but it can also turn people away “Mr. Smartypants here, thinks he knows everything.” Leading anatomists of his era probably would’ve done everything they could to discredit da Vinci for providing data that might prove them wrong, if he published these journals. The religious institutions of his era surely would’ve declared his views of the human body as a beautiful, self-sufficient machine blasphemous and heretical. How many political and medical industries would’ve been destroyed and presumably rebuilt, based on his findings? One thing we know about human nature, no matter the era, is that people don’t enjoy finding out they are wrong. Many of da Vinci’s tests, findings, and theories arrived at by scientific methods bore fruit, of course, but if he permitted publication of his findings, da Vinci probably would’ve been a pariah in his era. It’s possible he would’ve been exiled, excommunicated, or executed for publishing his findings, as they were the most popular methods those of his era had for dealing with those with whom they disagree, but the other method they had was various forms of book burning. Would da Vinci have been declared such a blasphemous heretic that the religious community, the medical community, and all of the politicians who supported them probably would’ve branded da Vinci’s work in such a way that we wouldn’t have any of his great paintings or his journals? How likely is it that popular opinion might brand da Vinci’s work in such a way that anything he did would be branded in such a light that they would’ve approached the owner of the work with torches to destroy it?

No matter how we characterize da Vinci, it’s obvious he considered himself a one man show. He didn’t accept an idea based on politics, religion, or what was widely accepted in the scientific community as a truth either. Nor was he married to his own ideas. As with most great scientists, he made a number of false assumptions that led to numerous mistakes. When he recognized those mistakes, his journals note his frustrations by saying things like, “impossible to know”. Those of us who love reading about the brilliant minds of history, and have read almost all of Isaacson’s books, know that even acclaimed geniuses make huge errors, and/or declare a subject “impossible to know”. It’s as if they’re saying, “If I can’t figure it out, it’s impossible to know.” Unlike most people, however, da Vinci didn’t let himself get in the way of him eventually finding an answer, or the truth. His notes detail an impatience with the project and the very human frustration of not being able to find the answer quickly, but they also inform us of a resolve that might have superseded most of his peers in eventually arriving at answers that still shock the world. It shocks us that he arrived at some unprecedented conclusions, because we consider his resources and the conventional wisdoms of his era. He didn’t care, to some degree, if his findings offended the politicians, the religious, or his friends. I write to some degree, because there were reasons why he never published the work, and there were reasons why he wrote it all backwards.

The knowledge I have on art, in general, and da Vinci in particular, barely scratches the level of novice. So, I assumed that my art enthusiast friend knew more about Leonardo da Vinci than I ever would. When you’re a novice with a particular obsession, you assume everyone knows more than you. Novices don’t know where they first heard the nuggets of information they share. We can’t remember where our fascination started. We read books, little nuggets on various websites, and we watched bios and documentaries, and we compiled so much over the years that much of Isaacson’s book was rehash. When I dropped these little nuggets on this art enthusiast, I expected her to nod and usher me forward with leading questions to information Isaacson unearthed that she didn’t know. Her amazement at what I considered elementary knowledge of da Vinci informed me that some of the times the relatively useless trivia we have swimming around our heads can be surprising bits of information to the unsuspecting.