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APP—Bodily fluids do not exist . . .

14 Sep

The APP in the title does not stand for an application for your phone or your computer or any other of the flood of digital gadgets on the market. It stands for A Previous Posting. I originally posted this brilliant essay on the use and misuse of certain words in June of 2009 in response to a request from one of my daughters, the one that lives, loves and works in Northern Virginia. The same daughter just commented on a recent posting and asked me if I would write something on the use of the word bodily, so now you know why I dragged it all the way here from fifteen months ago. I posted it specifically for her, but I’ll cheerfully share it with you.

Bodily fluids do not exist

A certain phrase is frequently—nay, incessantly—used on television and radio stations, in face-to-face conversations, in magazine articles, books, newspapers, pamphlets—in every element and circumstance in which English is spoken and written, we hear and read this phrase—bodily fluids.

A pox on the multitude of unlearned speakers—a pox, I say, on those that use the term bodily fluids.

Bodily fluids do not exist—there is no such thing.

Listen up:

The human body does not contain any bodily fluids, nor do the bodies of any other organisms contain bodily fluids—not the lower orders of animals, whether bipeds, quadrupeds or no-peds, not mammals, not ruminates or non-ruminants, not bees, birds, flies, fleas, ticks, termites, aardvarks, arachnids, reptiles, mollusks or crustaceans—not one zoological organism that exists among our planet’s fauna—nothing that flies, walks, runs, climbs, crawls or slithers, whether on land, in the air or in the world’s vast oceans—not one contains bodily fluids.

Not one.

However, all contain body fluids, substances which are vital to life, including those that remain in the body at all times unless spilled in accidents, or deliberately spilled in altercations, up to and including death. There are, of course, specific body fluids that are expelled naturally through normal body functions—perspiration and tears are a couple which come to mind, but there are others.

Why, you may ask, would I say there is no such thing as bodily fluids? Well, just in case you do ask, I will answer in advance. Bodily is an adverb. Adverbs are usually formed by adding ly to a verb, and the new word is intended to take the action of the verb that precedes it (it usually, but not necessarily, follows the verb in the sentence).

An example would be, “He spoke softly.” He is the subject, spoke is the verb, and soft is the object of the verb, the word which takes the action of the verb, with ly added to show how he spoke—softly.

Please note that body is not a verb—it is a noun, and therefore proper English does not authorize the suffix required to transform it into an adverb. Body can stand as the object of a verb, as in “He caressed her body gently.” Her body is the object of the verb caressed, and the adverb gently tells us how he caressed it—that’s gentle with the e dropped and the y added.

But I digress—on with the posting.

Example of bodily’s proper use:

“The bum was bodily ejected from the club by the bouncer.”

This tells the reader or the listener that the bouncer (subject) ejected (verb) the bum (object) bodily (how he was ejected). Not only did the bouncer eject the bum’s hat, shoes, underwear and outer clothing—he ejected his entire body including everything he was wearing—by ejecting the bum’s body, he ejected him bodily.

Example of body fluids proper use :

On arriving at the crime scene the CSI investigators collected items intended for DNA testing—included in their collection were traces of  semen, sweat, spittle, urine and feces (those CSI people are very thorough). That which they collected were traces of body fluids, not bodily fluids (judging by the above, this may well have been a sex-related crime scene).

And now, finally, the conclusion of this posting:

Nobel prize winners, doctors of medicine, doctors of letters, ambassadors, presidents (oh, yeah!), senators, congressmen and most egregious of all, newspaper columnists and virtually every talking head and commentator and journalist on television—all, almost without exception, refer to body fluids as bodily fluids—the misuse is so universally voiced that some doubt exists (mine) as to whether the proper term will ever be used. I fear that, similar to the word nuclear, the improper use of bodily as an adjective has corrupted our language and is here to stay.

Consider our penultima president (that’s the next-to-last president, the one immediately prior to the current occupant of the White House). He frequently had need to use the word nuclear, and he consistently pronounced it new-key-ler. Affected (and infected) by his eight years on television, approximately half the English-speaking world (my estimate) now pronounces the word new-key-ler. I predict that our current president, simply from exposure to television and talking heads, commentators and roving whatevers, even with his ivy-league education, may soon endorse that mispronouncement and make it mandatory by issuing a presidential edict—in that event, the word would probably appear on his teleprompter as new-key-ler.

A pox on the multitude of unlearned who use the term bodily fluids:

Bodily fluids do not exist. There is no such thing. Fluid in the body is body fluid.

A pox on the multitude of unlearned who say new-key-ler:

The word is spelled nuclear. It should be pronounced nuclear.

That’s my story and my complaint, and I’m sticking to both!

 
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Posted by on September 14, 2010 in death, education, news sources, newspapers, Obama administration, proper english, Writing

 

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11th Street South and a Kool cigarette . . .

12 Jun

My mother smoked cigarettes from my earliest memories all the way to her eightieth birthday, and periodically during those years she said, I’ll stop smoking when I’m eighty. On her eightieth birthday, just as she had promised, she stopped smoking and she stopped cold turkey—no dependence on any system designed to control the habit. She lived another three years, then died following bypass surgery for an aneurysm near the heart—the doctors said that her lungs were in remarkably good condition, especially considering her past history of smoking.

Hers was one of the surgical situations in which the operation was a success but the patient died.

In my early years she smoked Kool cigarettes, those with mentholated tobacco and a cork-tip for filtration—smokers addicted to that brand probably believed that although they were damaging their body they were being medicated for the damage at the same time. As far as I know the maker never claimed that, but there is no doubt that some smokers believed it to be true—my mother was one of those believers. For those not familiar with the brand, it was represented by Willie the Kool Penguin, beginning in 1934 and ending in 1960, and there is no doubt that Willie sold a lot of Kool cigarettes.

The first cigarette I smoked was a Kool—well, it was the first cigarette I attempted to smoke—I couldn’t make it go. My mistake was in trying to set fire to the filter-tipped end instead of the tobacco filled end, the part that was supposed to be lighted. All I got was a really nasty taste and a really bad smell in the area where I tried to light the cigarette, a smell composed of burning cork, burning tobacco and burning mentholatum, a real bummer. I was a first-grader somewhere along in my first year of schooling at Miss Mary Stokes’ Elementary School in Columbus, Mississippi. Click here for an excellent posting, even if I say so myself!

You can also find the information on Miss Mary Stokes’ school by clicking here.

Following my failure to light the cigarette I quickly consigned it and the burned match to our outdoor privy—toilet—and opened doors and windows throughout the house and fanned a magazine all through the house in an attempt at fumigation. It must have been effective, because none ever knew about my first attempt to smoke—my family may be learning about it with this posting.

I hate to admit it, but my next attempt to smoke was highly successful, accomplished at age fourteen, establishing a habit that continued for more than twenty years. I ran out of cigarettes one night and simply never bothered to ever smoke again—I never bought another carton or another package of cigarettes, nor did I ever bum a smoke from another smoker—I simply quit—cold turkey. I’m unsure why I stopped, but I may have heard a silent voice saying ominously—it is time—shudder, shudder!

Now travel with me back to Eleventh Street South, a street block on which I lived at one end and Fuqua’s Grocery stood at the other end. Back in those days—the good old days—one could purchase a cigarette with one penny—any brand of cigarette. If the proprietor had no open package of the brand desired, he would open a new pack in order to satisfy the customer and make the sale. There was no prohibition on children smoking—it was a practice generally frowned on, but nobody ranted and railed at seeing children smoking, nothing more than a tsk, tsk, perhaps.

I had the requisite penny and I decided to buy a cigarette. My mother had often given me a penny and asked me to go to the store and get her a Kool cigarette, so my request for a Kool came as no surprise to Mr. Fuqua. Of course, I took no chances—I lied and told him that my mother had sent me for the cigarette, and he had no reason to think I was being somewhat untruthful.

As an aside, in those days the owner also maintained a supply of saltine crackers available for purchase by the piece—for the price of one penny, a customers could get sausage or cheese and two crackers. Five cents for an eight-ounce Coke, a 12-ounce Pepsi or a 12-ounce RC Cola, then five cents more for ten crackers and five slices of cheese or sausage made a sumptuous meal for many people, including workers, during the days of the Great Depression—a depression that lasted far longer in the southern part of our nation than in other parts.

That’s it—that’s the story of my first attempt to smoke. I can pinpoint the year and almost to the month and day when I smoked the last cigarette. It was definitely in 1967 in the wee small hours of a Saturday morning in the spring—it was a filtered Winston cigarette that I huffed and puffed right down to the filter while fishing on Medina Lake, a fisherman’s paradise some thirty miles northwest of San Antonio, Texas. My fishing companion was Charley, a friend from work that smoked Swisher Sweet cigars and—-well, I’ll stop there and finish the story in a later posting. Stay tuned!

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

 
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Posted by on June 12, 2010 in Uncategorized

 

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Bidets, bypasses, bulls and barbeques . . .

24 Apr

I awaken quite early every morning, regardless of the time I retire. I am a news freak, but since most of the news on television is a repetition of the day before, I use the wee small hours of the morning to cruise the internet and write. This morning at some time around 3:00 AM I found a very interesting web site—click here to learn how to never again need to use toilet tissue—well, perhaps just a bit of toilet tissue as opposed to reams of it.

I’m certain that most everyone is familiar with the adage admonishing us that The job’s not finished until the paperwork’s done. That slogan is true, particularly when considering the necessary clean-up job required following the elimination of our body wastes, specifically urine and fecal matter.

The web site shown above extols the virtues of using a patented version of the bidet to accomplish the necessary clean-up. Its makers claim that it is more effective, more sanitary and less expensive than using toilet paper, and that it will save an infinite number of trees, thus continuing the fight against global warming—shades of Al Gore!

In the interests of full disclosure, I must reveal that I have no female parts—nope, all male, so I am not restricted to any directions in which to move the paper—so to speak. I can go any direction I choose—forward, backward, inward, outward, left, right or in a circular motion. I can blot, rub, pat, scour, crush, or squeeze, or I can do a combination of any or all of the above, and when the paper comes up clean, I can be certain that the job has been well done.

I must digress here to ask the question, with due apologies to all, that I first heard voiced by the late comedian George Carlin: How does a blind person know when the job is done?

I have spent considerable time in thoughtful speculation on the subject, and have come up with several possibilities, none of which I consider completely successful or acceptable. I suppose that the best substitutes for sight would involve a blind person’s tactile or olfactory sense, or a combination of both senses.

But enough of the digression—I must return to my  solution for saving the trees, a solution that will negate the need for toilet tissue or for any other materials, whether kleenex, catalogues, newspapers, calendars, receipts, oak leaves, or other materials such as wash cloths, towels, shirt tails, corn cobs or currency.

Most of us are familiar with the term gastric bypass surgery, a surgical alternative to dieting in order for one to lose weight. The several bypass surgeries available include rouxeny, biliopancreatic diversion with duodenal switch, lap-band adjustable gastric banding, vertical banded gastroplasty and sleeve gastrectomy. Click here to learn more about each procedure.

Once again in the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I am neither a medical doctor nor a body mechanic—the procedure that I am suggesting in order to save the trees by eliminating the use of toilet paper must be developed by others such as the brilliant medical personnel that perfected the different gastric bypass surgeries—I am limited to offering suggestions that could possibly enhance our quality of life—suggestions made possible by my innate capacity to think outside the box.

This is my suggestion for saving the trees:

When we swallow, whether solid food or liquid, the epiglottis closes off the passage to our trachea and directs the swallowed material to our esophagus and thence to the stomach—click here for an explanation of the process. My suggestion is so simple that I wonder why it hasn’t been suggested—I suspect that someone, somewhere, may well be working on the same idea.

This is my simple suggestion, admittedly submitted by a simple person. Given the various definitions of the word simple, I would prefer that the positive ones be applied to me—some of the negative ones are quite depressing.

Ready?

Here it comes—I call it the FourM process—Master Mike’s Matter Manipulation.

The user—the sitter, so to speak—simply holds the business end of a water hose in the mouth, with pressure controls manipulated by the sitter, and flow of water being swallowed will be diverted through a surgical bypass system and routed directly to the intestines. The resulting pressure will force the intestines’ contents downward and outward. The user needs only to release the sphincter muscle periodically and contract it as required to allow the passage of the intestine’s contents out and into the toilet bowl—much as the sphincter muscle is controlled when one has inserted a suppository or is taking an enema. And here it must be noted that both in the case of a suppository and an enema, the user may sometimes inadvertently lose control of the sphincter muscle.

The stream should be made to swirl in a circular motion as it traverses the small intestine in order to thoroughly cleanse the passageway, and such swirling should also cleanse the immediate outer area of skin surrounding the final opening, the medical term for which, of course, is the anus—see diagram above.

I offer my suggestion with full recognition of the difficulties researchers will face in developing a procedure to divert water under pressure directly to the small intestine, but I believe that it can be done, given the miraculous bypasses that have been developed in other areas of the body, including the heart, blood vessels, kidneys and other vital organs and areas of the body.

A warning: Precautions must be taken to control the pressure and volume of the flushing element, with attention paid to a system of overrides in case a user decides to experiment with higher pressures than necessary. Given the fact that the elimination of such body wastes is normally a pleasant experience, such attempts may be expected.

So there you have it. This is my gift to medical science. I offer it freely with no thought or hope of remuneration or recognition, although I consider it to be, potentially, one of the great medical discoveries of the world, comparable to the discovery of penicillin. Had I been immersed in my bathtub when I thought of this, I would probably have exclaimed, as did the great Pythagoras when he formulated the 47th Problem of Euclid, and upon on the discovery of which he is said to have exclaimed, Eureka!, in the Grecian language signifying, I have found it! You can read about his discovery here.

In fact, he was so proud of his find that he is said to have sacrificed a hecatomb of cattle to celebrate—to those that may not be aware of it, a hecatomb is 100. I have only one problem with such sacrifices—ostensibly in various religions, the flesh of animals sacrificed for religious reasons is not to be eaten. If that really happened, I would like to believe that the flesh was not wasted—with 100 head of cattle sacrificed, the ancient Greeks could have had the mother of all barbeques!

 
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Posted by on April 24, 2010 in Uncategorized

 

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Florida find—lifeless legs in landfill . . .

30 Mar

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/jarred-mitchell-harrell-charged-in-slaying-of-7-year-old-florida-girl-somer-thompson/19416157

The following item was taken from the above URL :

ORANGE PARK, Fla. (March 26) — A 24-year-old unemployed restaurant worker was charged Friday with murder in the slaying of a 7-year-old Florida girl whose body was found in a Georgia landfill after she disappeared walking home from school, authorities said. Jarred Mitchell Harrell was charged in the death of Somer Thompson, who went missing Oct. 19. Her lifeless legs were discovered two days later in a landfill about 50 miles from Orange Park.

Lifeless legs?

Is the word lifeless used for alliterative  reasons, or perhaps used as filler to complete a newspaper column? If legs are found, regardless of where, when, why, who or how, any reader with even the paltriest particle of perceptive power will know that the legs are necessarily lifeless. Please note the foregoing lined-out phrase—it includes a four-word alliteration (paltriest particle of perceptive power), but it is unnecessary, just as is the word lifeless, the adjective used to describe the legs found in a Florida landfill.

Something else is missing from the article—was the body dismembered? At first read, one may safely assume that the girl is dead based on the word murder and the term lifeless in reference to the legs, but must we also assume that the body was dismembered? The article states only that the lifeless legs were found. Was the dismemberment of the body omitted, perhaps, in deference to the emotions of the deceased’s family? In that case, the authors of the article should have refrained from using the term gruesome in this sentence: They sorted through more than 225 tons of garbage before the gruesome find.

Quality journalism does not require such assumptions to be made. To quote Detective Joe Friday’s signature statement from Dragnet, a long defunct television show: We just want the facts, ma’m—just the facts.

A corollary to the adjective lifeless, as used in the above article, is the use of the adjective dead as applied to a human body. We never read or hear that The live body of the missing man was found today. What we read or hear is that, The missing man was found alive and well today. Conversely, we read or hear that, The dead body of the missing man was found today. Note the lined-out word in that sentence—was it needed to let the reader know that the missing man was found dead—not alive, but dead? Of course not—the word body is sufficient information.

For some of the years (too many) that I toiled in the work force, one of my co-workers was a woman for whom English was a second language. She frequently accused me of neet peeking. Well, I am not a nit picker.

I am a fault finder, and I will energetically exercise that attractive attribute to the best of my ability. Please note the three alliterative phrases in that sentence—all are unnecessary but all are self–fulfilling and space–filling (writers are sometimes paid according to the number of words used).

Enough said!

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

 
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Posted by on March 30, 2010 in Family, Humor, law enforcement, news sources, newspapers

 

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Bodily fluids do not exist . . .

14 Jun

A certain phrase is frequently—nay, incessantly—used on television and radio stations, in face-to-face conversations, in magazine articles, books, newspapers, pamphlets—in every element and circumstance in which English is spoken and written, we hear and read this phrase—bodily fluids.

A pox on the multitude of unlearned speakers—a pox, I say, on those who use the term bodily fluids.

Bodily fluids do not exist—there is no such thing.

Listen up:

The human body does not contain any bodily fluids, nor do the bodies of any other organisms contain bodily fluids—not the lower orders of animals, whether bipeds, quadrupeds or no-peds, not mammals, not ruminates or non-ruminants, not bees, birds, flies, fleas, ticks, termites, aardvarks, arachnids, reptiles, mollusks or crustaceans—not one zoological organism that exists among our planet’s fauna—nothing that flies, walks, runs, climbs, crawls or slithers, whether on land, in the air or in the world’s vast oceans—not one contains bodily fluids.

Not one.

However, all contain body fluids, substances which are vital to life, including those that remain in the body at all times unless spilled in accidents, or deliberately spilled in altercations, up to and including death. There are, of course, specific body fluids that are expelled naturally through normal body functions—perspiration and tears are a couple which come to mind, but there are others.

Why, you may ask, would I say there is no such thing as bodily fluids? Well, just in case you do ask, I will answer in advance. Bodily is an adverb. Adverbs are usually formed by adding ly to a verb, and the new word is intended to take the action of the verb that precedes it (it usually, but not necessarily, follows the verb in the sentence).

An example would be, “He spoke softly.” He is the subject, spoke is the verb, and soft is the object of the verb, the word which takes the action of the verb, with ly added to show how he spoke—softly.

Please note that body is not a verb—it is a noun, and therefore proper English does not authorize the suffix required to transform it into an adverb. Body can stand as the object of a verb, as in “He caressed her body gently.” Her body is the object of the verb caressed, and the adverb gently tells us how he caressed it—that’s gentle with the e dropped and the y added—the l was already in place.

But I digress—on with the posting.

Example of bodily’s proper use:

“The bum was bodily ejected from the club by the bouncer.”

This tells the reader or the listener that the bouncer (subject) ejected (verb) the bum (object) bodily (how he was ejected). Not only did the bouncer eject the bum’s hat, shoes, underwear and outer clothing—he ejected his entire body including everything he was wearing—by ejecting the bum’s body, he ejected him bodily.

Example of body fluids proper use :

On arriving at the crime scene the CSI investigators collected items intended for DNA testing—included in their collection were traces of  semen, sweat, spittle, urine and feces (those CSI people are very thorough). That which they collected were traces of body fluids, not bodily fluids (judging by the above, this may well have been a sex-related crime scene).

And now, finally, the conclusion of this posting:

Nobel prize winners, doctors of medicine, doctors of letters, ambassadors, presidents (oh, yeah!), senators, congressmen and most egregious of all, newspaper columnists and virtually every talking head and commentator and journalist on television—all, almost without exception, refer to body fluids as bodily fluids—the misuse is so universally voiced that some doubt exists (mine) as to whether the proper term will ever be used. I fear that, similar to the word nuclear, the improper use of bodily as an adjective has corrupted our language and is here to stay.

Consider our penultima president (that’s the next-to-last president, the one immediately prior to the current occupant of the White House). He frequently had need to use the word nuclear, and he consistently pronounced it new-key-ler. Affected (and infected) by his eight years on television, approximately half the English-speaking world (my estimate) now pronounces the word new-key-ler. I predict that our current president, simply from exposure to television and talking heads, commentators and roving whatevers, even with his ivy-league education, may soon endorse that mispronouncement and make it mandatory by issuing a presidential edict—in that event, the word would probably appear on his teleprompter as new-key-ler.

A pox on the multitude of unlearned who use the term bodily fluids:

Bodily fluids do not exist. There is no such thing. Fluid in the body is body fluid.

A pox on the multitude of unlearned who say new-key-ler:

The word is spelled nuclear. It should be pronounced nuclear.

That’s my story and my complaint and I’m sticking to both!

 
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Posted by on June 14, 2009 in death, education, Humor, news sources, proper english, Writing

 

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