Life, Distilled: #2: A fine art in the high-tech world
David Lawrence Ramsey
10/12/2004

Trying to learn the skills to get a high-tech career?  All those 
universities and technical schools out there claim to be able to teach 
you these skills, but they leave out the most important one you'll need: 
how to curse properly when your high-tech systems screw up.  Without it, 
you'll end up suffering the same fate as all the other poor people who 
never learned good profanity, meaning you'll have to settle for using 
the one expletive you know over and over when things go wrong.  Why am I 
focusing only on high-tech careers?  It's simple.  As technology becomes 
more advanced, there are more and more ways for it to screw up.  This 
goes hand in hand with the need for more and better curses, as 
illustrated below:

Stone Age: "My [expletive] club broke.  Now I'll have to find another 
one to bash the enemy tribe's heads in with!"

Modern Age: "My [expletive] kafwurkulator's burned out.  Now I'll have 
to disassemble the [worse expletive] frabombanator to get to it, and if 
I knock any [even worse expletive] wires out of place, the [worst 
expletive of all] zagronkalator won't work anymore!  There goes 
production for today!"

This combination is good for another reason as well.  Under normal 
circumstances, if other people hear you accusing an inanimate object of, 
say, being an illegitimate descendant of rats, they'll think you're 
insane.  However, if you accuse a complicated-looking machine of that, 
then they won't even blink.  This especially applies if the machine is 
of such low quality that it appears to have been designed on an 
Etch-A-Sketch by a chimpanzee high on crack.

Of course, the relationship doesn't hold in some cases.  Giving all your 
pent-up obscenities free rein when something malfunctions is probably 
not a good idea if you're in a profession such as the priesthood.  "I 
cannot give the sermon I was planning to give today, because it was lost 
when the... thrice-blessed... word processor crashed.  Instead, my 
sermon will be on the sin of bearing false witness, which the word 
processor programmers committed when they called their... flawed 
product... quality software.  May God have mercy on their souls."

The key to good profanity is technique.  One way to learn good technique 
is, of course, by example.  The people who've been working the longest 
in your chosen field should probably be good examples, as they've seen 
the most problems and therefore have the largest stock of words to hurl 
at those problems.  If, in your attempts to learn their vocabulary, you 
have trouble catching them at the right times, try following them around 
as much as you can.  If they curse at you for getting in their way, 
consider it a bonus.

Another way to learn good technique is to teach yourself by inventing 
your own curses.  In order to do this well, you should have a vivid 
imagination and a sick mind to begin with.  (In other words, you should 
be a pervert of vision.)  There's only one rule that you need to 
remember if you want to be self-taught: curses don't have to make any 
sense.  In the process of cursing, you can accuse something of being 
covered in blood when it isn't, of being made of excrement when it 
isn't, of having sex with livestock when it can't, etc.  Be creative and 
enjoy.

Now, with all this talk of cursing, you might think that I'm advocating 
its use anywhere.  This isn't true at all.  There are some people who 
can't appreciate cursing, such as young children, and you should try to 
spare them from it.  It's often difficult to do that, though.  Just look 
at the tale of Sleeping Beauty, supposedly written for young children: 
"She shall [expletive] her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and 
die."  The tale of the Three Billy Goats Gruff sets a much better 
example by teaching useful life lessons, such as how to deal with your 
enemies by head-butting them off bridges and watching them fall to their 
deaths.  It certainly won't warp any minds with inappropriate language!

Good luck learning the profane arts.  Remember, an amateur can make 
other people cringe, and an expert can make other people cover their 
ears, but a true master can make other people's eardrums sprout tiny 
arms and pull their surrounding ears shut.  And there are many eardrums 
out there that need exercise, so go forth and be heard.