This is all
Much Ado About Nothing
–William Shakespeare
Scene II
CONRADE
Away! you are an ass, you are an ass.
DOGBERRY
Dost thou not suspect my place? dost thou not
suspect my years? O that he were here to write me
down an ass! But, masters, remember that I am an
ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not
that I am an ass. No, thou villain, thou art full of
piety, as shall be proved upon thee by good witness.
I am a wise fellow, and, which is more, an officer,
and, which is more, a householder, and, which is
more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in
Messina, and one that knows the law, go to; and a
rich fellow enough, go to; and a fellow that hath
had losses, and one that hath two gowns and every
thing handsome about him. Bring him away. O that
I had been writ down an ass!
edit to add a reminder that Dogberry was a constable who thought too much of himself and his office.
The issue isn’t if the word Ass is obscene. It’s not. The issue is a cop wasting everyone’s money and time over it.
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…the officer asked Webb how “a parent of a small child would explain the meaning of the words.”
It’s common enough for the self-appointed protectors of public decency to invoke this scenario. I’m sure the people who say such things imagine they are protecting the innocence of youth and preserving some continuity of public decorum. Which is not actually a crazy goal.
But I think it’s interesting that this way of phrasing the issue puts a parent’s discomfort, embarrassment, and inconvenience first. And last. And only.
Now how could we tell (in general) if that’s just sloppy euphemism by a would-be censor or if such objectors only have empathy for grown ups?
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We can only hope that word of his hobby didn’t get around to his fellow inmates while he was in lockup.
Damn you, Rule 34! Damn you!
(Somewhere out there is a tool maker who had to carefully engineer a steel injection mold to look vaguely like a scrotum… :-/ )
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How do you explain this to a young child? Easy roughly …
“I Eat Ass” is a very rude thing for a person to say. Sometimes being rude is funny and makes people laugh, but it can also hurt people’s feelings if they don’t know you’re joking so you shouldn’t say rude things.
Unfortunately mindless bible thumping morons can’t deal with jokes, metaphors, or figurative meaning. These conservative dopes have to be so tediously literal that I’m exhausted after dealing with them all day.
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“In Heaven there is dragon meat, on Earth there is donkey meat”
(天上龙肉，地上驴肉).
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Reading that reminded me of the “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols” obscenity trial; espeically this bit (from Wikipedia),
"The prosecutor conducted his cross-examination “as if the album itself, and not its lurid visage, was on trial for indecency”, according to Heylin, Mortimer produced an expert witness, Professor James Kinsley, Head of the School of English at the University of Nottingham, who argued that the word “bollocks” was not obscene, and was actually a legitimate Old English term formerly used to refer to a priest, and which, in the context of the title, meant “nonsense”.
"Lawyer [Geoffrey Robertson], who appeared with Mortimer, recalled the professor saying that early English translations of the Bible used “bollocks” to refer to testicles, this being replaced by the word “stones” in the King James version of the Bible, at which point Rotten handed Robertson a note saying, "Don’t worry. If we lose the case, we’ll retitle the album Never Mind the Stones, Here’s the Sex Pistols ".
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And people who don’t neuter their pets. My sensitive eyes don’t want to see mammalian sex organs from ANY species, lest I be reminded of my own species.
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Not bible thumping, but, eh - still - I’d rather not have to explain it to my kid. And, uh, once that genie is out of the bottle, they WILL use it somewhere… and if they aren’t clear on what it means at some point one might have a school meeting where we need to talk about Timmy saying he eats ass or some such.
Not sure how I feel about it being codified as obscene. Probably not, but I’d still prefer people had better common sense…
ETA - As an example, I own a Combichrist “What the fuck is wrong with you?” bumper sticker, but don’t have it on my bumper.
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"In Heaven there is dragon meat, in Texas there is Tractor Meet*
*Of course, there are certain Texans who would claim that Heaven and Texas are synonymous.
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Limits to freedom of speech:
Banning Hate Speech: That’s what the Europeans do. Totally slippery slope. Literal Nazis.
Banning Obscenity: Doesn’t count. Why the fuss?
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(disclaimer: I think Americans are way too uptight about this stuff)
I learned my first dirty jokes from public school. It’s probably more valuable as a teaching moment for a child to learn there is a time and place for these things, than for a parent to try and hold onto some perceived notion of their child’s innocence.
You have every right to raise your child as you see fit. But you rights end when they infringe on my human right of free speech.
It’s almost a guarantee that little Timmy doesn’t understand the full context of what the phrase means, even if someone say down and tried to explain it. OTOH when some other kid does something like that, I find it hilarious.
If someone heard a little kid say this, they are an idiot if they thought the kid knew what it meant or was a practitioner of said sex act.
It might be a case of someone virtue signalling by declaring offense because they think some hypothetical person might be offended. I’d like for laws to be made in response to actual documented harm to children, rather than some imaginary moral outrage.
That kind of stuff is for teenagers to put on their cars. Most of us have employers that are easily triggered.
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Banning Hate Speech & Banning Obscenity: Be very, very careful about handing the state power over which speech to permit and which to criminalize. If the present regime does not demonstrate the danger, nothing would.
Ummmm… how do you know how ass tastes?
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The deputy arrested Webb and was charged with "obscene writing on vehicles and resisting an officer without violence."
And the award for “crime fighter of the year” goes to this jackass.
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“When two people love each other very much…”
I slightly lost the thread for a second there, and when I read your comment my first thought was, “peanuts?” Then I clicked to see what you were replaying to. “Ah.”
FTFY. I know it’s not easy to keep it in mind with everything going on over here, but some of us aren’t like – what appears to be – many of us.
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Oh, like you’ve never lost your temper and chewed out an asshole or two.
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A jackass you say?
Do you think Webb tried to eat him?
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Quantitative Flavor Profiling technique and NIST Reference Ass flavor?
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