L' Anglo-Saxon!!!

It's everywhere.


My blogging colleague David Mott used it in a recent post discussing the challenges presented by the form he needed to fill out for financial aid for his daughter.

A Facebook friend used it to describe the amount of snow her state is getting -- in May.

It's a word I tell my daughter not to use except in dire straits -- not because I think the Anglo-Saxon is vulgar (it is, but it's catnip to teens) but because it makes her look ignorant.

It's a word I've used myself a few times when I drive ten miles from home and realize I've left the book I needed to return to the library...at home. In the privacy of my car, but almost never in public.

And I use it, like perhaps you might, as an intensifier, not as a particularly sexual term. I've heard enough of that from some of my online pals to make me wonder if they should go back and read Shakespeare.

A little Renaissance creativity goes a long way.

But my fellow bloggers don't use the "f" word by itself -- instead they combine it with a few other words...

as in "wtf is going on here?"

I haven't used it in print, but that's mostly because it's not part of my vocabulary most of the time, and I try, here, to be family-friendly.

Although, rabbit trail, I was taken aback when someone recently used the word "sex" to search my blog. So many blogs give better sex than this one.

Do you think that using the formerly-banned in polite conversation word this way is making it, well, a little less bawdy, a little more like ketchup and less like wasabi?

And if that's the case, what are we going to find to replace it?

Terrorists and rifles? Coming to a town near you?

I still am amazed.
In our shoot first, ask questions later culture, I should not be, I suppose.
Know who Faisal Shazhad is?
For those of us who have been hiking for the past couple of days, he's the terror suspect who planted the bomb in Times Square.
He also had a wicked looking gun. Why he didn't use it may come out in his trial, since apparently the fellow leaks like a faucet.
But what if he'd been on the terror watch list?
We'd be safer then --- not.
For Mr. Shazhad could buy a gun -- legally.
Congress doesn't think we keep anyone but children from buying guns.
Even terrorists.
After all, your Second Amendment right to kill someone else trumps the right of an innocent bystander on a New York City street to walk the streets safely.
I'm sure this is just what our Founding Fathers had in mind.

Are you deadlined? Or disciplined?

Generally, I don't lose things.
But I do misplace them.
Usually, that's until just after I really need them the most.

Like that note that one of my editors stuck on a book telling me, as she does with her other freelance writers, when our review is due.

I'm so glad that it wasn't due today. Yes, I did find the note, as I started near the very beginning (of the volume), a very good place to start when the review is supposed to be emailed in two days.

The interesting thing is that my editor tells me most of her reviewers get stuff in to her early.

EARLY!

The awesomeness of it.

I do best when I have deadlines with their little gimlet eyes, staring at me.

This time, however, I am going to be tested.

I have a story to file and aforesaid book commentary due on Wednesday.

Then an afternoon on Lancaster for multiple interviews on the crisis in institutional Christianity on Thursday.

A commentary due Friday on the same subject.

And, hmm, a revision of an interview due over the weekend.

Thank God I'm not preaching this week!

So what are you? A just in time guy or a woman who doesn't like the stress of having to produce something before your boss is walks into the office tomorrow at nine?

I keep vowing to reform.
How about next week?