#forgraham

The user ‘BoobRockets’ on Reddit asks:

What kind of language would a sailor use to actually curse, i.e. how would one literally curse like a sailor?

And ‘jschooltiger’ responded with an excellent answer. The beginning of his answer interested me most, emphasis mine…

This is a great question, and there are a few levels of answer to it. Before I start I want to distinguish between types of "bad language" -- roughly, we can draw a distinction between profanity (taking Gods's name in vain, or cursing God -- often called "blasphemy"); obscenity (sexual or scatological language); and vulgarity (coarse or crude language that might not rise to the level of vulgarity).

I didn’t know the nuance of these terms. And I love how they’re being explored.

My brain has its own classification system. It goes something like this, from worst to best:

Words that are only used in sad circumstances, like malignant or suicide.

Words my mother doesn’t like.

Words I wouldn’t say in front of strangers.

Words I would think about saying to strangers when cut me off in traffic.

Words I would say so teenagers would mistake me for cool.

Ina Jaffe for NPR:

[Lydia] Smith never saved for retirement. It didn't occur to her. And with the kind of money she made working as a clerk in a department store and a cashier at a restaurant, there wasn't much left over anyway.

This is the story of most of the 2.6 million women ages 65 and over who are living at or below the poverty line, says Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security at the National Women's Law Center.

Over a lifetime, she says, "women earn less than men because their wages are lower and they're more likely to take time out for caregiving." And, she says, women live longer than men, so "they have to stretch these lower benefits over a longer life span."

And Lydia Smith isn’t the only one. This is common.

"The poverty [rate] of single women [living] alone is 18 to 20 percent," Hartmann says. "Many of these women may not have any relatives. They might not have had children. [Or] those children might not be in a position to help take care of them."

Today I learned that the Latin phrase ab ovo usque ad mala translates to from the egg to the apple. Those were the traditional items eaten at the beginning and end of a Roman feast.

To us, she wins the cliché “voice of our generation” badge she never asked for, but deserves nonetheless. There’s a lot about her online, which she hates but also seems to have moved past. Besides, a lot of it is suspiciously broken. Her tweets auto-delete every week, adult-mag.com is down following a hack, and many of her widely shared blog posts are no longer visible. 

This bit made me think about what I’m/we’re leaving behind.

I learned recently that the term legendary comes from the term legend, in the sense of a legend that people used to keep notes in. If something was worthy of being written down, it was legendary.

But I wonder what’s being written down now, and how it’s being collected.

Take for example this blog, it’s essentially a funnel for the things I find online that feel related in someway to to time, aging, and elders. I try to post things that cause me to spur or reconsider how I think about those topics.

And the indented quote above did just that.

What will be our living record? Can social media actually function as a memory? Or what I’m really saying: will my theoretical grandchildren be able to glean anything of me from flippant remarks and asides and echoes of things other people post? 

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Small aside: I loved this…

I do understand that other people don’t think this way about the Internet. They’re like, “The internet is public.” A lot of things are public, but it doesn’t mean they’re for you. For instance, you can walk down the street and you can look into all of your neighbors’ windows should they have chanced not to draw the curtains. If you really lean in, you can listen to all kinds of conversations that are too quiet for you to just overhear. You can do all kinds of things in public that you should not do. Are you walking down the street, interrupting random twosomes or threesomes of people to add your two fucking sentences? 

From Reddit user ‘jcepiano’:

One of my piano teachers passed away last month. This is one of his final performances he gave back in July at the age of 88. His body might have been failing him, but we're lucky that his mind, soul, and hands were in amazing shape.