Poll: Religious/Office PC Sensibilities

[Shagnasty]

[QUOTE=Othersider]
[ul][li]Great Odin’s raven![/li][li]By the beard of Zeus![/ul][/li][/QUOTE]

Oh Lord Lucifer!

[Tapioca_Dextrin]

No one around here says “Jumpin’ Jesus” or anything similar. Mind you, of the 90 or so people on my oil rig, we only have five native English speakers.

“By Grabthar’s hammer, what a question!”

[Othersider]

One of my past comrades used to say “Sweet Jesus!”

[CBCD]

@Daithi Lacha

So an open question to you all: Civility aside, should my blasphemous compatriot curb her tongue to mollify an individual? Or since it’s not specifically proscribed, should she do whatever she damn well feels?

OP, you raise an interesting question. Putting civility aside, should she do what she damn well feels? If people put civility aside, and do what they damn well feel like doing, you end up with people acting in a manner that is uncivil, rude, offensive, and unpleasant. So why put civility aside? We should retain civility as a central value in our actions.

[Daithi_Lacha]

@CBCD

OP, you raise an interesting question. Putting civility aside, should she do what she damn well feels? If people put civility aside, and do what they damn well feel like doing, you end up with people acting in a manner that is uncivil, rude, offensive, and unpleasant. So why put civility aside? We should retain civility as a central value in our actions.

An excellent point, and well made!

So yesterday passed with nary a controverial utterance. I’m under strict orders to give the partion which seperates our cubicles a punch if I hear a transgression, so as to provide immediate feedback as to the rate of occurance.

For my part, I try to limit my foul mouth to “Aw, crap,” “Jiminy Christmas,” and a Russian phrase that I don’t know how spell, but sounds like “Bozjha Moy!”

[Padeye]

And for Hindus who are also Simpsons fans there’s Shiva H. Vishnu!

I’m suprised no one suggested Judad Priest. My grandmother is the only one I’ve heard use it much. It puzzles some of the younger grandkids who think grandma is into metal bands.

[Phedre_no_Delaunay]

@Cervaise

I for one would be very happy to see a resurgence of the Shakespearean “zounds!” I’ve tried it a couple of times but I’m having trouble getting it to catch on.

(Regarding pronunciation, it’s short for “God’s wounds” and rhymes with it, rather than the common and incorrect version that sounds like “clowns.”

{slight hijack} This is incorrect. While it is indeed short for “God’s wounds,” it is pronounced to rhyme with “hounds” and “sounds.”

According to Charles Harrington Elster’s The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations:

…I have seen the actors usually mispronounce it ZOONDZ or ZWOONDZ. I suspect this is the result of an assumption on the part of certain speech and dialect coaches, or directors, that because zounds incorporates the word wounds it should be pronounced with an OO as in soon rather than an OW as in out, the usual sound of the diphthong ou. This assumption is false.

The noun wound…and the verb wound…were originally pronounced WOWND, like the past tense of the verb to wind…Chaucer, Marlow, Shakespeare, and Pope rhymed wound with *found, hound, bound, *and ground…

Zounds, therefore, being an old-fashioned word, should properly follow the old-fashioned pronuciation of wounds and rhyme with hounds…

Let the record show that there is no reliable authority for any pronunciation other than ZOWNDZ. The word should not follow the OO sound of the modern pronunciation of wound. It must have the OW sound of the old-fashioned pronunciation.

There is much more in the entry in the book.

{/hijack}

[Cat_Whisperer]

See, this is why I keep coming back here. Where else can you get a serious discussion over the correct pronunciation of “Zounds”?

As for the OP, I think this is one of those compromise on both sides situations. Neither is obviously wrong or right.

[delphica]

I have nothing to add regarding the OP, but I would like to note that I’m going to start saying “Oh, clowns!” whenever an expletive is called for.

[MsRobyn]

Nothing of substance to add, except this nice Jewish girl didn’t know “Jesus Christ” wasn’t an expletive until she was 12 or so. I was sheltered, what can I say.

Robin