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Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 1,624
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 1,624 |
It has all the hallmarks of the results of a rummage through a thesaurus. None of the rest of his article hints at the use of such highflown terms for such a lowlife definition! Well, f**k him, I say!
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 3,467
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 3,467 |
Fr Steve,
I agree that the author seems to have pulled feculence out a thesaurus, as it certainly is as jarring in the context as the language used elsewhere in the article.
But it's also true that perhaps we need to be jarred a little bit. I admit to the use of salty phrases, etc., but using them on the air is going beyond a line in the airwaves which a genteel society would neither venture nor permit others to venture.
I don't think that this is a "slippery slope to indecent language," as the headline on the article said. It is instead a precipitous descent toward a non-society tarred with the brushes of boorishness, incivility, crassness, crudity.
TEd
TEd
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
I am distressed by the feculence of the wide screen.
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Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542 |
in the very next line the phrase "separates the decent from the indecent" appears; at this point I too would have opened my thesaurus (or perphaps not ;) and replaced indecency -- isn't that what a thesaurus is for?!
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Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 2,636
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 2,636 |
So, would you perhaps choose ithyphallic over indecent?
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Joined: Aug 2002
Posts: 2,154
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2002
Posts: 2,154 |
I keep hearing that movie language has to be crude to be "realistic" but somehow it used to possible for a comic to be funny without being indecent and for a tough guy to be tough without four letter words. (although maybe that's why they were the strong silent type)
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Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475 |
would you perhaps choose ithyphallic over indecent?
Since when are fishsticks indecent. What a minute, I'll come in again. Since when did ithyphallic become synonymous with indecent? In Greek, it's a religious word. Dionysius was a generative god.
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Joined: Jun 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2001
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Webster's 1913 Dictionary Definition: \Ith`y*phal"lic\, a. [L. ithyphallicus, fr. ithyphallus, Gr. ?, membrum virile erectum, or a figure thereof carried in the festivals of Bacchus.] Lustful; lewd; salacious; indecent; obscene.
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Joined: Jan 2004
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475 |
"An ithyphallic audacity that insults what is most sacred and decent among men." In the OED, besides the religious term and a poetical meter, this one citation is used for the gloss: grossly indecent, obscene. I argue that the meaning in the sentence above is the technical one, and the lexicographer has transferred his own repugnance into a new, spurious meaning. But I could be wrong.
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