Taking advantage of customer service policies just because you can. Like buying something from Walmart, using it, and then returning it for a refund or exchange weeks after the fact even though nothing was wrong with it. Not only does that constitute stealing, but it’s just tacky and classless.
Shuffling your feet when walking. Pick up your damn feet and move like someone who has some sense. A lot of people who wear flip flops seem to do this.
This one upset my stomach.
wearing flip flops outside of the dorm showers is pretty degenerate also
Look, I was starving, I’m SORRY.
People, mainly women, who go to bars with no money in their pocket expecting other patrons to buy them drinks.
Hey, if someone offers to buy your drinks; fine. But don’t just expect it, that’s awful damn presumptuous.
And if you’re a women doing this, you’re setting your gender back by about fifty years.
Hey - as long as you’re not using your fingers to do so, eat all the icing you want. Here, have mine!
I once sat (well, stood, actually) behind a dude at a college football game who got nachos from the concession stand, then used the Finger Licking Method to consume every. last. particle. of fake cheese sauce from the plastic container.
And he had really long nails, which for some reason made it grosser for me.
I literally had to turn around and stand backwards, because having his little nacho lovefest anywhere in my line of sight was making me want to hurl.
Senator Joe McCarthy used to do that before drinking: he claimed it soaked up the booze.
OH OH, then later can you top all that by again bragging on how little you spent that night.
I’m grossed out if I get food beneath my own fingernails. Food on fingertips? Okay. Food under long fingernails? Horrifyingly icky.
I’d disagree that the majority of them are just anonymous hunks of wood and metal- its often joked by collectors that the only thing any two Lee-Enfields have in common is the calibre. The thing is, many millions of these rifles were sporterised Back In The Day- which means (IMHO, and that of every other serious military rifle collector) there’s no reason to take a perfectly good historic rifle (and they’re all historic now, by virtue of their age) and sporterise it because you want a cheap deer rifle. Buy a second hand Winchester/Remington/Ruger/Something not historic and use that
FWIW, it’s against the law here to sporterise firearms- and rightfully so. If you decided to paint over a Van Gogh because the sunflowers weren’t yellow enough, you’d be just as degenerate (in my view) as people who take historic rifles and chop them up to make them 2 lbs light and bolt the Hubble Space Telescope onto them. There’s reason this practise is informally known as “Bubbarising” the rifle, with all the negative connotations thereof…
Let’s hope it remains rare.
I do recall seeing a friend eat a hamburger from Fuddrucker’s – a haven for grease of all varieties anyway – with a prodigious amount of semiliquid cheese meant for french fries and nachos.
I do not exaggerate when I say he has cheese in his eyebrows by the end. Made me so queasy I couldn’t finish my meal.
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned drugs. To me, the idea of spending a lot of money for drugs to snort, inhale or inject to get high, instead of using that money for food, clothing, shelter, savings, caring for your children… that to me, is degenerate. All that money, for, well, nothing!
And that’s probably pretty hypocritical, too–I’m a smoker and I like booze. And there’s nothing to show for it afterward but fond memories, a little less health, and an empty wallet.
Hm.
Okay, how about eating premium ice cream whilst in a hot bath? I’ve done that, and thought it was degenerate!
Count me in with you two, Cal and Gorilla. Eating in your vehicle is ‘irredeemably degenerate’? You’ve obviously never had to run between two jobs at lunchtime, or spend eight hours (or more) in a company vehicle as part of your job. Sometimes my partner and I can actually get a real break and go in someplace and eat like civilized human beings, but a lot of the time we have to eat on the run. Take tonight for example: I had 15 minutes to get to the hospital for a pick-up, and we had just enough time to stop at a fast-food place and grab a bite, which we had to scarf down on the way. This was about 7:00 pm, and I hadn’t had anything to eat since noon.
This is ‘irredeemably degenerate’? Too bad this isn’t in the Pit.
Little Plastic Ninja, I owe you one laugh.
My contribution: irresponsible use of apostrophies. They’re there for a reason–you don’t just spray them about like Rambo shooting VCs with an assault rifle. I won’t point it out, but one post where someone went out of their way to use an irregular plural form in place of the proper possessive irritated the hell out of me. A good example of that is “the diaries contribution to our understanding of his life” instead of “the diary’s contribution…”.
Consonant Cluster Reduction (“I’m bias” instead of “I’m biased”) bugs the hell out of me, too. Usually I calm down when I remind myself that we got perfectly cromulent forms like “ice cream” and “skim milk” out of it, but it’s still irritating. Sometimes I think linguistic ignorance would be bliss.
OTOH, people who trash Ebonics and other nonstandard forms as “lazy English” make me want to get all medieval on their asses with a bucket full of Chomskyism and draw charts and graphs illustrating how Ebonics actually makes more sense than Standard American English. Frankly, most of the reason I don’t is that I don’t generally have enough paper on me.
Little-known chemistry fact: when a certain kind of cyanide is in the air, nicotine will react with it and change the taste of cigarette smoke quickly, before exposure to the cyanide actually hurts anyone. Ergo, some scientists have been known to leave a lit cigarette hanging out of their mouths when working with cyanide, so they can quickly tell if they accidentally release some of it into the room, and take the necessary measures.
I thought this, until I saw this particular copy of Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut at Cosmos Coffee & Tea in La Mesa. I picked it up out of curiosity and saw this written on the front inside cover:
"Take this home and read it.
No, really! It’s yours!
Just please bring it back or give it to someone else when you’re done.
–Firstname"
Sweet! So I read through the book, and there was no more writing on it, until those blank pages in the back, where the guy went to the trouble of analyzing the literary themes of the book in outline format. That was awesome.
I used to think that, too, until I worked in a bookstore and saw all of the sheer crap that gets published and, even worse, bought.
Especially since you’d be naked.
I gotta say, making child porn has gotta be #1 on that list, and looking at it at least #2.
Bass.
Without encouraging the violation of US law–you can do it without breaking the law–I must say that you’ve obviously never had a psychedelic breakthrough. I’ve gotten more insight for $20 before than I get from the textbooks I drop hundreds of dollars for every semester. It’s all perspective.
I do agree with you on one thing: If you have kids, and you don’t live well within your means in other ways, it’s maddeningly irresponsible and, yes, degenerate to spend your money on drugs regularly. But the same thing goes for alcohol, cars, movies, etc.
Smoking, dipping and gum-chewing. Filthy.
I was coming in here to post chewing tobacco. Gato beat me to it.
I think there are scales of degeneracy–child porn is on one list, snuff is on another.
I had a high school friend who used to do that. She was, and still is, pretty skinny.
What drives me up the wall is people who raise their hands to ask long convuluted questions 30 seconds before the end of lecture. I think this counts as a habit because it’s always the same people. Go ask the prof. after class. Go to office hours. Send her an email. Just stop talking – some of us have places to go after class.
What really gets my goat are people who pick up something in a grocery store, only to decide two or three aisles later they don’t want it. But they’re are too lazy to put it back where it belongs so they’ll stick a fresh steak in the ice cream case or leave a jug of milk where the ears of corn are or they’ll drink half a cup of the coffee that the store is kind enough to offer to their shoppers and stuff the remains behind the cans of peaches. People like this don’t deserve to shop at all. They deserve to live off the overripe tomatoes and other old produce that others choose to lob at their homes!