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I’m a day late (and, per usual, a dollar short) again, without the excuse of extreme illness, but this is a topic so important that it took an extra day. Pray forgive.

I was texting some of the folks in my fantasy league yesterday, making fun of some of the other folks in my fantasy league for bad draft strategies (Jesus Montero? Really?), when one of us dropped the strange phrase, “A was man said…if they wanna live in a donut, let ’em live in a donut!” I replied “Dammit, now I want a donut,” and was immediately asked, “What kind of donut would you live in?”

I was struck dumb. A more important question had never been posed to me, and I include “Matthew, do you take this woman to be your wife?” in that statement. What kind of donut would live in? I couldn’t answer right away, because it’s all complicated, and whatnot. I knew I had to blog a post about it. (I considered, in fact, starting an entirely new blog just to discuss the question and its attendant theories and research, but I simply haven’t the time.)

It’s not as simple as just “What is your favorite donut?” which of course is a question that could spawn thousands of graduate dissertations and a massive 3-day conference at a major university (either Harvard, or anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon that’s reasonably near a Krispy Kreme franchise). But that’s a good place to start. What is my favorite donut? A standard chocolate frosted from Dunkin Donuts has always been my go-to, but so much depends on mood. In the autumn months, the strong cinnamon notes of an are really the only way to go. I certainly won’t turn down a regular chocolate cake, nor what is invariably termed the “Manager’s Special,” which is essentially a Boston Creme (chocolate frosted, custard filled) except that the filling is standard white sugar frosting.

(We no longer have a Krispy Kreme nearby, so we shall not speak of their luscious hot glazed treats. We shall also ignore the bakery that makes the finest donuts in the world, the Fractured Prune, for two reasons: 1. they also have no franchise in northern Delaware, and 2. no human could survive living in one because the aroma and flavor of the walls would drive him mad.)

“Favorites” aside, there are many things to consider. Let’s be clear: we are intending to make this donut our home! Does this mean that we are better served with a standard donut, defined as “a donut with a big-A hole in the middle,” since otherwise, where would we stand, and put our fine antiques? Or are we better served with a filled donut, operating under the assumption that the contents would simply be consumed before, or even during, the move-in process? I lean towards the latter, for the simple reason that a filled donut, carefully emptied of its interior, would have a roof, and a regular donut has a big hole in the center and you’d get wet when it rained.

My choices for filled donuts are the “Manager’s Special,” the “Apple Crumb,” and I’ll even throw in a nice powdered chocolate-filled. I believe we are forced to eliminate the latter two out of hand, because both crumbs and powder would respond poorly to rain, whereas a well-sealed chocolate glaze should be able to keep moisture at bay for at least a few days.

My choice, in the end, is the “Manager’s Special.” I would simply eat the cream filling, slightly enlarge the hole so that my piano could fit through it, and move in. Of course, if you are averse to white cream and prefer custard, the Boston Creme is another viable option.

You might think a jelly-filled donut might be best. You might be an idiot.

I know that 1) it’s not Monday, so what the H am I doing updating on here, and 2) I’m one of maybe three Americans who care a whit about the English Premier League, but I’ve been hearing a lot of people poop all over Luis Suarez this week, and I wanted to get my tuppence in.

Since you (probably) don’t follow the EPL, here’s the lowdown. Uraguayan Luis Suarez, striker for the Liverpool Football (soccer, you dolt) Club, got into a bit of a heated argument with Patrice Evra of Manchester United a few months back wherein apparently Suarez addressed Evra as “Negrito” or “Negro,” depending on the account you read. He says he only did it once, and, oddly enough, meant it in a non-racial way, as in Uruguay apparently saying something like “Hey, negro” is roughly equivalent to you or me saying “C’mon, bro” or “Hey, man.” I read one account where “someone in the know” said it wouldn’t be particularly surprising to hear a Uruguayan say something like it to his own mother, with no disrespect intended. However, Evra took offense, the powers-that-be got involved, and Suarez was widely accused of being a racist, which Suarez and the Liverpool club protested loudly. Suarez later apologized for causing offense, but was handed an 8 game suspension by the Football Association, which he duly served over the last few months, returning to the lineup last week. Evra, to his credit, said that he was willing to shake Suarez’s hand and put the whole thing behind him.

Over the weekend, Liverpool played ManU again, and during the pre-match introductions, Suarez refused to shake Evra’s hand, and predictably the football (sorry, SOCCER) world lost its collective poop. Eventually Suarez and Liverpool had to issue apologies, and sports reporters the world over are saying that Suarez is an embarrassment and should never be allowed to play soccer for Liverpool ever again.

Okay. Let’s construct a straw man, and call him Don. Let’s say Don is a sportswriter for a major sports magazine. And he’s writing a nice little feature about, say, Matthew Jordin (also a straw person), who is notorious for not passing the basketball. And let’s say Don uses the following sentence in his article:

Jordin is notoriously niggardly with his distribution of the ball.

Now, you and I know that the word “niggardly” has nothing to do with “The N-word.” They are etymologically unrelated. But let’s say Jordin doesn’t know that. And he reads the article and accuses Don of being racist. Don knows he’s not racist, but the sports magazine wants to save face, so they tell him he has to apologize. Wanting to keep his job, he posts something to Jordin’s twitter account about how he’s sorry he used the term, it wasn’t intended to be racist, and he won’t use it in future. But Jordin’s not happy, and continues to rile up the rest of the media, who say that Don should have known better, and maybe he actually IS racist, and he should resign. Eventually Don is called into his editor’s office and told he’s suspended for 3 months. After the news is disseminated, Jordin posts something on Twitter about how justice was done, and he forgives Don, and wants to put the whole thing behind him.

3 months later, Don’s covering a local pro-am tournament because it was the only thing he could convince the editors to let him do after coming back to work. He comes across Matthew Jordin, who’s playing a round that day. Jordin sticks out his hand. Now, because Jordin misunderstood the true meaning of the word that Don used, Don has suffered professionally and his reputation is sullied. If you were Don, would you shake the man’s hand? Don’t you think he has a little bit of a right to be angry and unforgiving?

I’m not saying that Suarez shouldn’t have shaken Evra’s hand. In fact, I think he was being rather stupid not to do so, particularly since before the game he told the team manager Kenny Dalglish that he would. If he couldn’t predict the controversy that would result, he’s an idiot, and sometimes you just have to suck up your feelings for the benefit of your team and your career. What I am saying, however, is that perhaps the media and the fans could be a touch more understanding of a man who honestly feels he was wronged by a player and the Football Association, doesn’t believe he did anything racist, and was severely punished anyway. Let’s let this one go, Planet Earth.

I was never what you could describe as a Whitney Houston “fan,” for whatever reason. I’ll stipulate that she had what is probably the most prodigious talent of any pop singer ever, but none of her songs struck a chord with me (get it? lulz). I don’t say this to demean her accomplishments; we all know my taste is ridiculous and absurd. I mean, I have an “Evan and Jaron” mp3 on my phone.

You know what? Let’s come back to this.

Last fall, after William (our latest and last offspring) was born, and HW and I spent much of the day sitting in front of the TV either feeding him or trying to get as much rest as we could while he slept, we watched a fair amount of TV. This is how, for example, we plowed through 4 entire seasons of DVR’d “The Big Bang Theory.” We also spent a lot of time watching “Hoarders” and “Toddlers and Tiaras,” and I’d like to compare and contrast those shows a bit.

We watch them, like everyone else, because they make us feel better about ourselves, as homemakers and parents, respectively. If you’re ever feeling depressed because you don’t have time to keep the house spic and span, spend 15 minutes watching Matt Paxton and his crew bag up dead cats and rotting adult diapers, and you will feel much better about your cleaning skills. If your kids are misbehaving and driving you up the wall and you’re thinking “What the hell am I doing wrong with these maniacs?” then you should spend some time with the crazy-ass moms (and, occasionally, dads) who drag their daughters to pageant “lessons” and makeup artists and dress fittings and you will realize that whatever you may be doing wrong, at least your daughter is about 1/10 as likely to become a streetwalker as the girls on your TV.

America loves both shows (along with similar ones like “Hoarding: Buried Alive” and “Dance Moms”) because Americans love a good train wreck. The feeling you get when the door opens on a bedroom filled to the ceiling with old clothes and rat feces is pretty much the same one you get when you watch a 5-year-old girl stubbornly refuse to try on her new pearly false teeth while her white trash, coffee-can-shaped, and faintly maple-syrup-scented mother says “Now c’mon Pixeelu honey, we need to try these on, and then we’ll go get some sugar donuts.” There is, however, a key difference: enabling.

On Hoarders, you watch people who are clearly at a low point in their lives try to resolve their issues with the help of psychologists, organizers, and professional cleaners provided by the show. It doesn’t always work, but at least there are stabilizing elements there to try and improve the lives of the subjects. “Toddlers and Tiaras” has none of this. Every person that appears on the show is there to add to the insanity, from the “dance instructors” to the pageant officials to the make-up artists to the mothers themselves. Every one of them is either telling the child how perfect she is, or how she’s screwing up royally and has no chance of winning or ever becoming anything and it’s no wonder Daddy left. No one disciplines, no one models good behavior, every activity is carefully (and poorly) designed to get the child to perform on the stage and fulfill her parents’ dreams. Occasionally you’ll see some poor henpecked father, clearly not thrilled about what’s going on and certainly unhappy about his failings as a parent and husband being put on television for the world to mock. For the child, it’s a life of work, expectations, bribery, and the life-or-death world of “pageanting.” What she learns from this is, as long as she’s pretty and performs well, no one will ever tell her “no.”

Which brings us back to Whitney. Once she had established herself as a superstar, how many people do you think ever told her “No?” She was a meal ticket to everyone around her. Who would risk losing that? If Whitney wanted to go party, Whitney got driven to the party. If Whitney wanted to try cocaine, the mirrors and straws were instantly out. Adding Bobby Brown to the mix was like tossing a hand grenade under a propane tank.

Whitney was hardly the first talented person too achieve rapid fame and then burn out, and she won’t be the last. What’s the solution? Hell if I know. As long as there are people who profit from meteoric rise of talent, we’ll watch as talented people slowly kill themselves. Sometimes brilliant folks just need to be told, “No.” Ya know?

I hope you all had a blissful, gift-filled, alcohol-fueled holiday season, which of course doesn’t FULLY conclude until my birthday later in the month. Like most Americans, I have made resolutions. Unlike most Americans, they don’t have much to do with fitness, because I am already in the middle of my lifelong fitness resolution (more on this later), which is to get crazy jacked and look vaguely like Daniel Craig but without the haunting blue eyes and luscious, pouty lips (my own lips are quite full and luscious but I cannot maintain the same extruded pout without looking like a fish and/or duckface, aka duckfish).

My resolution is to attempt to produce, on time and without exception, a new update to this website every Monday that is insightful, enjoyable, and full of both fun witticisms AND as many pictures of Daniel Craig as I can fit given current intellectual property law.

What will it be? Who knows. It’s a Presidential election year, so I’ll probably make fun of the GOP. It doesn’t appear that Sarah Palin is running, as of this writing, so sadly that eliminates some easy humor, although Rick Perry is doing his darnedest to be equally stupid in public, and then there’s good ol’ butt juice Rick Santorum, and it’s only a matter of time before Ron Paul says something hilariously racist, which is a shame because in a past life I probably would have been a big Paul supporter, at least until the realization some time ago that the Libertarian ethos of “everybody get yours before I gotta get mine” is not really an effective way to govern society.

I may also do the occasional movie review, although I should warn you the movies will not be recent as I don’t like going to movie theaters, and I’m certainly not going to beg my wife for 2 hours away from her and the roughly 7 million children I appear to have at home to do something I’m largely indifferent to doing, with the obviously exception of any James Bond movie. So there’s a strong chance that any movies I’ll write about will be along the lines of “Street Kings,” a film from 2008 that I watched about 75% of the other night. (I can report that Keanu spends the entire time being Keanu, and Forrest Whitaker chewed so much scenery that I suspect he pooped drywall for a month, although at least a lot of people get shot, so it’s really the perfect thing to watch while rocking your infant son to sleep.)

I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about my fitness progress as well. A short update: I’ve been lifting hard and eating like a pig since just before Thanksgiving, and have gained a rather significant amount of weight. The gut has come back a little, but I see a big difference in my shoulders, my butt has become extremely Kardashian, and my thighs are getting so thick that 1) I’m having a very hard time fitting into pants, even though the waist and inseam fit fine, and 2) there’s not much room left for my testicles and I keep sitting on them. My back squat has gone to 327.5lbs, and my bench press is up to 212.5, although my deadlift is hampered by the fact that I only have 390 pounds of weights so I’m stuck there until I can buy more. I’ve been pretty strict about the Starting Strength program (not adding or replacing any exercises), but yesterday I decided it would be extremely nice if I had big ol’ swole-up guns so I’ve started adding a few curls and tricep extensions to the end Friday’s workout so the ladies will look at my arms and go DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN.

I was planning to start dieting again around my birthday, but I may push it off until later in the winter. I’d like to cut down to a trim 230 by summer and see how close I can get to having visible abs (something I’ve never had, EVER), but I hate, hate, HATE cutting because my lifts stall, and squatting over 300 pounds makes me feel like a real man.

So, uh, that’s what you have to look forward to. It’s gonna be real. Really real.

I wrote about 600 words of a September 11th piece and realized I was “writing angry” and was going to come off as a huge jerk. In lieu of actually posting it, I’ll break it down: Lee Greenwood sucks, we’re worse off than we were 10 years ago, the Republican Party is destroying America from within, and the terrorists won.

Nobody wants to read that crap. So, spiked.

I spent September 11th at church, mostly. I’m now singing “full time” (in the sense of singing every Sunday, not working a 40-hour workweek in the choir stalls) at the church where my parents and sister sing/play. It offers a lot of cool music opportunities, so in the afternoon we sang a Requiem Mass by Sir Philip Ledger written specifically for the church a few years back. It was pretty moving, and was topped off by going to Brandywine Prime for a light supper, dragging Sarah along for a last “date” before she has another baby carved out of her on Friday. I ate too much and drank too much, all of which is to the good.

Sat in front of the TV for a bit last night to take in a little football, but discovered I couldn’t care less about the activities of the Jets and Cowboys, and also PBS was showing the New York Philharmonic playing Mahler’s 2nd Symphony, which is superduper pimp. I performed it once in college and would like to note that Mahler was a jerk: no rational musician makes the basses hit F#s and Gs, that is just redunkerous.

WHYY apparently had the rookies at the controls, though, because a few minutes into the last movement, the TV inexplicably cut to commercials (on a public TV station, no less). Eventually the music came back on, after we’d missed several minutes of high quality German romanticism. During that time, I may have accidentally tweeted that WHYY should suck it. I stand by my statement.

I hope everyone had a restful weekend, devoid of airplane tragedies and Lee Greenwood songs. I’ll come up with something more substantive later in the week, and were I you, I would expect to see pictures of a new offspring come Friday, if we come up with a name for him.

In order that this site feels less like a juicehead blog and more like something that the average person would actually enjoy reading, I’m taking a quick break from the recounting of my “fitness journey” to hit on a few things that have been bothering me lately.

• Can someone explain to me how the “offsides” rule in soccer came to be? I thought of this during last year’s World Cup (USA! USA! USA!), was reminded of it during this year’s Women’s World Cup, and then again now that the English Premier League season kicked off over the weekend. It’s almost as if some FIFA official sat down one day and said to himself, “There is altogether too much scoring in football, we have to cut down on all these goals.” It’d be like moving the outfield fences 40 feet out to cut down on all those pesky home runs…something I would actively support. My point is…I have no point.


• I would just like to remind everyone that the Phillies are 9 games up on the division and on pace to win 106 games. Daddy like.


• The downside of dieting: sometimes my farts are just unbelievable. I laid a sulfurous bomb at work earlier that subtly altered the DNA of everyone in nearby cubicles. On the plus side, if any of ’em reproduce, the kids should be able to fly, or detect cesium with their toes, or something.


• I was pretty excited to see Michelle Bachmann win…whatever the hell it was that Iowa just did. It wasn’t a primary, right? Just some kind of “proof of concept” vote? Whatever it was, I was pretty stoked. I mean, the GOP’s batting a thousand with its presidential front-runners since 2008: every damn one of them has been bat-shit crazy. I think they’re 3 for 3 now, right? Hopefully Rick Perry will talk more about Texan secessionism or attempts to pray away droughts and they can lock in 4 for 4.


• “Texan Secessionism” would be a pretty pimp name for an alt.country band.


• The other downside of dieting: HOLY CRAP I’M SO HUNGRY ALL THE TIME.


• That reminds me, I need to do a post about Creatine and why it’s very effective and really annoying. So, uh, look for that.


• I cannot recommend highly enough a band I have discovered named “Passion Pit.” The fact that I have now purchased their album means that 1) they’re completely mainstream and everybody already knows about them, and 2) they’ll probably break up within the next two months, but I am a HUGE fan. I’m somewhat indifferent to electropop, but something about PP makes me happy in my bones. Go grab their album “Manners” and give a million listens. Apparently they’re working on a new album to be released next year, which would be hella rad.


• HW and I are having a boy and are having a hell of a time thinking of a name. Any suggestions? I open the floor to you.

Peace, playaz.

Who got a perfect score (15 out of 15) on this quiz about general religious knowledge? THIS GUY. Take the quiz, and then check out the demographic information. The second most knowledgeable were Atheists/Agnostics. “Worship Service Attendance” (weekly, monthly/yearly, seldom/never) had almost no correlation to increased knowledge. All in all a pretty interesting result.

I can’t decide if this is funny or not. Thoughts?

Been enjoying the “About My Job” series over at Andrew Sullivan’s crib. Two of them in particular resonated. A community college professor (and apologies, ’cause it’s kinda long):

I believe the assumption is that instructors are the product of a liberal-biased education and then we decide to join that liberal bastion and are just going with the established flow. For those of us in the junior college ranks, however, I think there is a more concrete reason for the lean left, rather than the abstract leftism offered in certain courses we took as students.

When I hear friends and family offer specific illustrations of why they list in a more conservative direction, it often has to do with anecdotes revolving around the person they check out at the grocery store using food stamps to buy a jug of Carlo Rossi zinfandel or spending their welfare check on some other decidedly non-essential item. Or the stories they hear from mutual friends in law enforcement or social services who deal with the dregs of society on a daily basis. Who could possibly support any form of social safety net when a portion of that net will be devoted to such vermin?

Well, on an equally anecdotal and emotional level (not pillars of rational thought, granted, but clearly major inspirations for why and how most people choose a side) we here at a community college tend to see the better side of our fellow humans who are struggling on the low end of the economic ladder. We see them trying to better themselves, working hard in spite of their conditions to try and take a step up said ladder. Hell, some of them may even be spending public money on a pack of Winstons, but we don’t see that. We see them in their best light, for the most part.

And that’s what I want people to know about my job: I don’t have empathy for poor people because I read Sinclair Lewis or Karl Marx; I have it because I work in an environment in which I see them at their best. Some of them are clearly not cut out for college, some of them are unpleasant to deal with, some of them probably do spend their meager checks on stupid things. But they are also trying to change their lot. And they have much less margin for error in doing so. If I taught at an elementary school or high school, I may assume that the kids in my classes were on their way to the destinies that social research and my own perceptions had fated for them. If I taught at a university, I would never meet people who take an English class so they can legitimately compete for a promotion at the hotel chain in which they work, or pass the nursing program to get their AA degree. The world would be easier to categorize. But since I work in the gray area between, I know that it’s not that easy, and that people defy your definitions for them all the time.

The whole thing also strikes me as interesting because it demonstrates how much of our “knowledge” is merely anecdotal. I had a good-natured argument over the weekend with a Twitter buddy who supports draconian sentencing of criminals. He defended this by talking about a woman he knew who was stabbed outside a movie theater by a recently released convict who just wanted to hurt “somebody white,” and also mentioned a family destroyed by a drunk-driving naval officer who escaped punishment. I don’t have any more information than this, and didn’t press him for details. I merely pointed out that modern Penology seems to indicate that deterrence wasn’t a factor in preventing most crime, and incapacitation tended to just produce hardened criminals who were more likely to be recidivist and stabby.

Politicians often talk about how they met Dorothy Babool in East Gabip, Iowa, and she patiently explained how such and such federal policy had deprived her of the money she needed for her excema medication which is why her skin was bright yellow and sloughing away in chunks the size of Delmonico steaks, and this means we have to change such and such federal policy so folks like Dorothy get the help they need. (On the left, it’s usually a policy that helps pay for Dorothy’s medication; on the right, it’s usually a tax-cut for people with Dorothy’s specific medical condition.) This works because while people may not know anyone with horrible leprosy, many of them can certainly identify with someone like Dorothy because she’s the same race, and roughly the same age and economic status.

Americans don’t deal well with statistics like “46 million American citizens with no health insurance whatsoever.” They respond better to anecdotal evidence, which is of course the least reliable evidence of all.

The other, largely unrelated Job, was Baroque Countertenor:

Being a sort of lower level, highly-specialized professional classical vocalist is really fun (I sing mostly in smaller pro choruses and as a soloist in local concerts), but can be annoying. For example, whenever I tell anyone what I do, they try to helpfully summarize by declaring I’m an “opera singer,” which I’m absolutely not. Then when I tell people that countertenors sing in their falsetto voices, they also helpfully summarize, “like a castrato?” No, there are no more castrati in the world, sorry.

Most annoyingly however is how, especially in North America, many assume that because singing is a wonderful gift and so much fun to do, I shouldn’t worry too much about remuneration. I can’t live exclusively off my earnings (although if I lived in Europe I probably could), and I am paid a fraction of the money of my instrumental counterparts, even though my skill is just as specialized. I find too many people associate the words “community” with “choir”—and friends of mine continue to express incredulity that I as a professional chorister with some of the best early music groups in North America should deign to get money for it. Working in the arts, as liberating and wonderful as it is, is a specialized livelihood, and it’s really hard breaking through the culture here where kicking a ball accurately is worth millions of dollars whereas perfect sight-reading, constant vocal practice, and good knowledge of period performance and ornamentation is considered a fun hobby for just about anyone.

Man, do I feel his dog. I realized some time ago that the thing I do best above all others is sing as part of a choir. I certainly enjoy singing solo, but I’m never going to be Sherrill Milnes. My skills (the aforementioned sight-reading, good performance practice, as well as a bizarre ability to concentrate at 3-hour rehearsals that is completely unavailable to me in any other part of my life) are perfect for being the section leader in a good choir. Sadly, if I were to quit my job and try to make a living as a professional chorister, I’d take something like a 70% cut in pay, if I were lucky, and took every single job offered me. The best choral musicians move on to become directors and choirmasters, but at age 32 that boat has probably sailed, and I’m a particularly poor motivator and people manager.

Semi-related: Happy New Year to all my Chosen friends! (I only remembered it because I’m singing the High Holy Days at a local synagogue this year.)

Golly, this post is just all over the place. Sorry about that. I’ll try and do better, you know, at some later date.

As a follow-up to Tuesday’s post, I came across this, which is only tangentially related: an old article at The Atlantic about the “real” Second World War. It discusses the remarkable dichotomy between the way the war was reported to the public, particularly in America, and the way real soldiers would describe the combat:

In the popular and genteel iconography of war during the bourgeois age, all the way from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history paintings to twentieth-century photographs, the bodies of the dead are intact, if inert — sometimes bloody and sprawled in awkward positions, but, except for the absence of life, plausible and acceptable simulacra of the people they once were… The same is true in other popular collections of photographs, like Collier’s Photographic History of World War ll, Ronald Heiferman’s World War II, A.J.P. Taylor’s History of World War II, and Charles Herridge’s Pictorial History of World War II. In these, no matter how severely wounded, Allied soldiers are never shown suffering what in the Vietnam War was termed traumatic amputation: everyone has all his limbs, his hands and feet and digits, not to mention an expression of courage and cheer…

What annoyed the troops and augmented their sardonic, contemptuous attitude toward those who viewed them from afar was in large part this public innocence about the bizarre damage suffered by the human body in modern war. The troops could not contemplate without anger the lack of public knowledge of the Graves Registration form used by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, with its space for indicating “Members Missing.” You would expect frontline soldiers to be struck and hurt by bullets and shell fragments, but such is the popular insulation from the facts that you would not expect them to be hurt, sometimes killed, by being struck by parts of their friends’ bodies violently detached. If you asked a wounded soldier or Marine what hit him, you’d hardly be ready for the answer “My buddy’s head,” or his sergeant’s heel or his hand, or a Japanese leg, complete with shoe and puttees, or the West Point ring on his captain’s severed hand.

What got my attention, and made me think of Tuesday’s otherwise unrelated post, was this quote attributed to Norman Mailer:

You use the word shit so that you can use the word noble.

I also found it attributed to Dwight Eisenhower with the phrase “without sounding ridiculous” on the end. I actually think it’s more effectively turned around to “You use the word noble so you can use the word shit,” which is one way of saying that one’s limited use of profanity has more impact because of the simple rarity of it. Like if your mother became infuriated at something and screamed an F-bomb. Whoa.

I, on the other hand, drop F-bombs so regularly that it’s difficult to tell if I’m angry until I start flinging poop.