Magic!

One thing I keep stumbling on here, is the supposedly magical properties of words.

When I'm playing WOW, I'm forever seeing people cursing by saying Jebus, or f*ck, or similar pseudo-expletives. For quite a while, I didnt really think about it, until at one point recently, I was upbraided for saying Jesus and told the acceptable spelling was Jebus.

Now, I get the idea that cursing by the name of someone else's god might be offensive to that god, but ... what is it, do these people think their god is that stupid, that you can fool him by changing a letter? That it's the actual shape of the word that is offensive, not the underlying referent? As far as I can tell, on the internet this whole style of thing arose because it was away to curse without setting off parental-screening-software and obscenity-detector-software (both of which strike me as an exercise in pointlessness, but never mind): not to avoid giving offense.

Of course, the Americans (at least) have a long tradition of this sort of idiocy: heck instead of hell, by golly not by god, and so on (and on and on and on), so perhaps they do think their god is extremely dim, or that words DO have a magick power just from their shape.

But damnit, one reason I go to the Internet is to -escape- the whole Bible belt culture of rotten hypocrisy and worship of conformism.

What particularly galled about this upbraiding is that the guy who delivered it had previously commented to me several times that he is not a Christian, so it's not like I offended him - he was just griping because I may give offense to someone else who is listening. Of course, he was actually using it just as an excuse to throw his weight around and show off to - well, I don't know who, or care really.

It's not the first time I've run into this whole attitude: there's a whole Oh-noes-not-in-front-of
-the-children attitude which seems ludicrous. First, if the Internet is a child's first exposure to obscenities, then somehow he/she has grown up without any access to TV at all (which, yeah, good luck on that), and second, if the child is stupid enough to not be able to work out that Jebus might be just a synonym for Jesus (or any of the other idiot substitutions), then, man, they are so stupid that they couldn't log onto the Net in the first place.

OK, end of rant.

On brighter news, it's a week til our settlement day! Ray (our friend in Oklahoma) is insisting I need a musket and a bedroll now that I'm about to be a landholder & potential militia recruit, but I've said I had a couple of thousand already (small ones, it's true). I should have promised to acquire them as soon as the nearest rampaging British army came within 500 miles, but ... well, they might send Brit troops to New Orleans for R&R & then where would I be? (having seen the English abroad, rampaging is an understatement - beware all your booze and beachtowels as soon as they come anywhere near!)

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