The Old Baguette was gently chastised by her buddies at church this morning. If the Archbishop should threaten her lovingly with excommunication or with a brisk burn at the stake, she should not stoop to rudeness. Rudeness never conquers. Instead, she should follow Dirty Harry's example and say, "Go ahead. Excommunicate me. Burn me briskly at the stake. MAKE MY DAY!" She should try her best to be sweet.
The Archbishop won't threaten the Old Baguette at all, of course. The Old Baguette is really old. If the Archbishop notices her at all, he won't think she could ever be dangerous. He would be wrong
Do tell, was this alleged rudeness an actual rude-ology that occurred or theoretical rude-ilism in the forms of a threaten rudeness?
ReplyDeleteMy jargon is based on a study of a branch of knowledge known as phactory phloor philosophy. Where I worked we had several individuals who practiced the fine are of issuing tuffilisms (a spelling purist would insist on thoughilism--but to prevent confusion with though as in although I used a bit of artistic license and ascribed a non-standard spelling). A tuffilism was the issuance of a promise of some future action usually issued by a member of the labor force against a member of management. "Wait till I see that son of bitch, I am going to tell him to shove this job up his..." That is a fairly typical tuffilism. Now the tuffology (again a license on spelling) would be that actual performance of the promise. Employee A tells manager B "Take this job and shove it up your ass!" Employee A then grabs his lunch bucket and walks out the door and is never seen again. That would be a class I tuffology. Can't say I have seen many of those, although years ago they did fire a guy for allegedly trying to run down a boss with a fork truck. Well that was management's version. The union's version was that the employee made a threatening gesture with the fork truck at such a great distance from the boss that the notion of personal injury was ludicrous. If I remember correctly the firing stuck and there was no strike over the incident. But to be honest it was too long ago.
Most tuffilisms did not involve fork trucks or other weapons. Mostly they were threatened refusals to do a specific task, a threatened ass chewing, threatened self termination of employment, or at worse a threat fisticuffs. Tuffilisms were a dime a dozen. At any given moment there were probably three tuffilisms in the air for every 10 employees. Tuffologies were rarer then hens teeth. One particular guy issued a constant litany of tuffilisms. He actually would outline the steps of the job by prefacing each step with "We are not going to do..." then he would walk away in a huff. Ten minutes later he would come back and we would proceed to do all things he said we were not going to do. This happened every day. Amazing!
Having followed the Old Baguette for well over a year now (when she and her computer deemed us an audience), I must confess a suspicion that the Old Baguette is just crotchety enough to not even bother with the rude-ilism and just jump right into the rude-logy. Unlike her brunch buddies, I applaud such efforts. When dealing with officers of the Church, The Old Baguette is dealing with a class of individuals who have only recently became polite and offer now loving cautions. But when you boil away all the "loving" bullshit, what are they basically saying? Follow us or the Kingdom of Heaven will be denied to you. Eternal damnation seems a tad rude to me.
Re-reading my above comment, a purist might also insist that I do a better job of proofreading. My fingers have taken up the fine are (art I believe that was meant to be) of hitting the wrong letters, throwing in s's where they are not needed and leaving them out where they are, and dropping "ed" off of words making a sham of any sense of tense, and neglecting the use of prepositions. While my grammar is far from good, it is not as horrible as the above comment would suggest. Forgive old fingers and old eyes, they ain't what they used to be.
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