James Foley, and the moral bankruptcy of the conspiracy theorists

Every time I think the conspiracy theorists can sink no lower, they outdo themselves.

Not that it's easy.  These are the people who think that everything from the Sandy Hook massacre to the Boston Marathon bombing were "false flags" to distract us from what the Evil Government is doing, or else outright hoaxes staged by "crisis actors."  They've dogged the footsteps of bereaved parents who have lost children to school shooters, desperate to prove that their child never existed, thereby ranking even lower on the Great Chain of Being than the members of the Westboro Baptist Church (who fall somewhere below slime molds themselves).  They spread their fear messages amongst the gullible, turning jet contrails into toxic "chemtrails," fluoridation of water into a campaign by the government to convert us all into mindless drones, and vaccination programs into a plan by "Big Pharma" to give our children autism, ALS, and lord alone knows what else.

And now they have latched onto the brutal beheading of James Foley by the butchers of ISIS as the latest target of their poisonous nonsense.

The flag of jihad [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

We have the conversation over at the r/conspiracy subreddit claiming that ISIS is an arm of the CIA.  Worse still, from the site Epoch Times comes a claim that the execution video itself is a fake, and that the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is actually an Israeli Jew named Elliott Shimon who is on the payroll of Mossad.  Other claims are floating around various social media, suggesting that Obama operatives staged the execution (or possibly carried it out for real) to distract us from the riots in Ferguson or the illegal alien crisis or the ongoing non-scandal surrounding Benghazi.

(And just for the record: though I provided links to the r/conspiracy thread and the Epoch Times article, I am actively recommending that you don't click them, unless you really enjoy experiencing outrage at near-aneurysm levels.)

But to the people promoting these ridiculous claims, I have only the following to say:

Have you no shame at all?

A man died, for fuck's sake, slaughtered in the desert with less dignity than we accord cattle in an abattoir.  His executioner's blank eyes are the face of true human evil, and the cause he belongs to is representative of the worst human nature can do.  I am by nature and philosophy a pacifist, but reading about Foley's horrifying last moments (I refuse to watch the video, and so should you) makes me roundly in favor of tactical strikes to wipe every last member of ISIS off the face of the earth.  These subhumans deserve no better.

And you dare to bend this story to fit your twisted little view of humanity?  You have only proven your own moral bankruptcy, if there was any doubt of that left.  Your lies are nearly as sickening as the brutal jihadist message of ISIS itself, because you, like they, have no apparent regard for the life and dignity of a human being who (by all accounts) was a kind, courageous, intelligent man whose death should be mourned in peace by his family and friends, not used as a means for bolstering a warped worldview.

It shouldn't surprise me by now.  You people are willing to lie about damn near everything else, why wouldn't I expect you to lie about this?

But it always does, somehow.  I always think, "This, at least, is beneath even the conspiracy theorists."

And I'm always wrong.

Alien rock mania

In the last week or so, there's been a sudden rash of claims of discovering alien artifacts on the Moon and Mars.

To which I respond: will you people please get a grip?

It's often hard enough, here on Earth, with the actual item in your hand, to tell the difference between a human-created artifact and an object with entirely non-human origins.  Chance resemblances and oddball natural processes sometimes result in rocks (for example) with strikingly organic-looking appearance.  For example, what do you make of this?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Looks like coral, right?  Or maybe some sort of fossilized plant?  Nope, it's a fulgurite -- a rock that forms when lightning strikes sand.

So chance appearances don't tell you much.  Especially when you are looking at a grainy photograph of the object in question.  And especially when you want very much for there to be something impressive there.

For example, we had a claim a couple of days ago over at the International Business Times that the Mars rover Curiosity had photographed what appears to be a thigh bone.  "None of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration scientists have spoken about it," the article states, with some asperity, "but the news has been going viral."

Well, when you look at the photograph, you'll see why NASA really didn't want to spend their time debunking it:

[image courtesy of NASA]

It's a rock, folks.  Being a biology teacher, I know what a thigh bone looks like, and this ain't one.  It's a rock.

Oh, and to the folks over at the IBT: you do not improve your credibility by following up the story on the Martian thigh bone with the statement, "In the past, there have been claims of noticing objects on the surface of Mars like a dinosaur spine, dinosaurs, mysterious light, a toy boat, an iguana, a cat and a half-human and half-goat face."  Just to point that out.

Then, over at The UFO Chronicles, we had Skeptophilia frequent flier Scott Waring claiming that what is almost certainly a digital imaging glitch was "clearly an alien base on the Moon."    Here's the image:

According to Waring, you can see all sorts of things in this, like a wall and the entrance to an underground facility.  Me, all I see is a black blob.  Not the first time that imaging glitches have caused a furor; remember when a glitch in a NASA photograph of the Sun caused all the conspiracy-types to claim that the Earth was about to be attacked by the Borg cube?

Then just this morning, we had another report from Mars over at UFO Sightings Daily that there's an outline of a wolf on the Martian surface.  Here's that one, which made me choke-snort a mouthful of coffee:

Helpfully colored in so that you can see it.  Sad for Mr. Wolf, however -- he seems to be missing one of his hind legs.  Maybe with the lower gravity, you can get by with three.

So anyway.  I really wish people would stop leaping about making little squeaking noises every time one of the lunar or planetary explorers stumbles on something that has a vague similarity to a familiar object.  Aren't there enough cool real things out there in space to think about?  You have to invent Moon bases, thigh bones, and three-legged Martian wolves?

I'm sticking with the science.  That's always been plenty awesome enough, as far as I'm concerned.

The creation of Zozo

We like to think of urban legends as a modern phenomenon.  As author Jan Harold Brunvand discusses in his wonderful book The Choking Doberman, word-of-mouth transmission of stories heard "from a friend of a friend" is a powerful way to spread memes; and of course, the internet has made it even easier.  Some of these stories are of modern provenance, given their mention of cars and other contemporary props.  But only for a few -- "Slender Man" being an example -- do we know exactly when and where the story started.

I ran into an urban legend of sorts that I'd never heard of just yesterday, and this is apparently one of those rare ones for which the origin is actually known.  The story is about the evil demon named...

... "Zozo."

Notwithstanding that "Zozo" sounds like something a rich old lady would name her toy poodle, Zozo is apparently a demon of incredible evil, according to the story on the subject over at Stranger Dimensions.  Apparently the first mention of the evil Zozo was in Jacques Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal, wherein we find that an unnamed girl from Picardy, France was possessed by Zozo back in 1816.

Inferno by Gustave Doré (1863) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But it wasn't until the invention of the Ouija board that stories of Zozo really took off.  Yes, I know it was invented by some entrepreneurial game-designers in 1890, and any positive results -- if you can call them that -- almost certainly arise from the ideomotor effect.  This hasn't stopped the Ouija board from becoming one of the most feared occult devices (hated especially by devout Christians).  Hollywood, never shy of capitalizing on hype, even has a movie called Ouija due out this Halloween, about some teenagers "awakening evil forces" using an "ancient spirit board."

But back to Zozo.  Once this method of "communicating with spirits" was invented, it wasn't long before the Zozo phenomenon really took off.  He (or it) was an evil spirit, claims said, that was always hanging around looking for a means of ingress.  The Ouija board acted to allow access, and once that avenue was open, Zozo wouldn't let go, but would torment the individual forever.

The whole thing has gained so much traction that there's a paranormal researcher, Darren Evans, who has a blog called The Zozo Phenomenon in which he documents hundreds of encounters with the evil spirit.  He calls himself a "Zozologist."  Here's one example of a story from his site:

Hello, I purchased a ouija board at a garage sale from an elderly couple.  I have always had an interested in the spirit world and had a great interest in trying to make contact.  I did not dare to play the ouija by myself so I just left it packed away until I had a friend convinced me to use it last night.  For an hour we spoke to this woman spirit and as we went on with the session the word "zozo" kept being spelled out.  As a newbie at this I had no clue what it meant until I looked it up and found it on your website.  The energy on the oracle was wild and i am certain if we had removed our hands it would have flew off the board. several times it tried to spell out the alphabet.  It was scary as heck and was terrified to see that it was evil… do I still need to cleanse the house even if we went to “goodbye”?  I have children and am scared for them.

Predictably, I still think the whole thing is nothing more than superstition and the aforementioned ideomotor effect, but of course, once this sort of thing catches on, it snowballs, just as Slender Man and Spring-Heeled Jack and El Chupacabra have.  Even Rob Schwartz, in the article at Stranger Dimensions I linked earlier, said:

But what is Zozo, and why has it terrorized thousands of people around the world? This, I’m afraid, is not an easy question to answer.  It’s difficult to tell which stories about Zozo are authentic and which are nothing more than urban legends.  Some tell of murders and suicides, while others involve possession, physical ailments, abuse, curses, and other phenomena commonly associated with demonic forces...  Could Zozo be a tulpa, a shared experience?  Like the Philip Experiment on a much grander scale, or the countless stories (and real life delusions) shared about the Slender Man, Zozo could be our own creation.

Well, yeah, I think that last bit is probably true, but not in the sense that he means.  A "tulpa" is a created experience come to life -- i.e. real -- and I doubt seriously whether that is possible.  As far as the "Philip experiment," I dealt with that in a post earlier this year, and I was (and am) of the opinion that even the people who participated knew it was a bunch of nonsense right from the beginning.

As far as Zozo, it seems to one of a growing number of paranormal phenomena that aren't misinterpreted natural phenomena, nor deliberate hoaxes, but purely human inventions that rely on credulity and a blurred understanding of the line between fact and fiction.  But it does make me want to go out and get a Ouija board and try to summon him up.  If Zozo is that easy to get a rise out of, it should be easy to settle the question of the existence of the paranormal once and for all, not to mention putting me in contention for winning the James Randi Million Dollar Challenge.

Creationist lab research

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post, wherein we looked at a creationist website and its unfortunate collection of misinterpreted and cherry-picked quotes in support, today we're going to examine the latest hijinks of the Adam-rode-a-dinosaur crowd.  Namely, a group of Dallas researchers who want to set out to prove "scientifically" that the biblical account is literally true.

The effort is headed up by Henry Morris III, who has 49 people on his payroll and an annual budget of seven million dollars and who is affiliated with the Institution for Creation Research.  And he apparently is earnest.  "Our attempt is to demonstrate that the Bible is accurate, not just religiously authoritative," Morris told reporters for the Dallas News.  "The rationale behind it is this: If God really does exist, he shouldn’t be lying to us.  And if he’s lying to us right off the bat in the book of Genesis, we’ve got some real problems."

Well, yeah, I can't argue with that.

But his staff members, of course, don't take that statement the same way as I do.  One of them, astrophysicist Jason Lisle, said, "I think everyone here is doing it because we believe in the message and we ultimately want people to be saved.  We want people to realize the Bible is trustworthy in matters of history and when it touches science.  And because you can trust it in those areas, you can trust it when it comes to how to inherit eternal life."

Which makes me scratch my head in puzzlement, mostly because I cannot conceive how you could be an astrophysicist and a biblical literalist at the same time.  Astrophysicists study objects that are unimaginably distant, some of them millions of light years away.  And if you believe that the universe and everything in it is only six thousand or so years old, then six thousand light years should be the furthest we can see -- because if there was anything more distant, its light wouldn't have reached us yet.

For reference, the Andromeda Galaxy, which you can easily see with binoculars on a clear night, is a bit over 2.5 million light years away.

Oh, wait, the speed of light might not be constant.  Or time might not be constant.  Or maybe god created the starlight already in transit.  Never mind.  (For a facepalm-worthy explanation of why stellar distances don't bother the creationists, go here.  Don't say I didn't warn you.)

So anyway, you have to wonder what these "scientists" -- and I use the word with some hesitation -- will come up with.  As I have commented before, when you assume your conclusion, magic happens.

But what places all of this nonsense in the realm of inadvertent comedy is a revelation broken over at the wonderful blog Why Evolution Is True, wherein we find out that an interview with the aforementioned Jason Lisle on the Dallas Morning News was green-screened in front of a fake lab and a whiteboard with a bunch of meaningless scribbles, including a bulleted list that says, and I quote, "Dino's, Ice, Rocket Man."  (Click the link to see the shot of the whiteboard; it's a hoot, and the site deserves your visit.)

So right from the get-go they're not exactly being honest about their "research," which should surprise no one.  There's no way you actually could do honest scientific research and come to these conclusions.  The evidence that the universe was created six thousand years ago is nonexistent -- making me curious about what they're doing with their seven million bucks annual budget other than paying their "scientists" to scribble random shit on the lab whiteboard.

Anyway, that's our news from the Genesis crowd.  I'm expecting the whole thing to fizzle, given the fact that there's pretty much nothing there to be studied.  On the other hand, expect a glowing report of success on the ICR's website to appear forthwith.  Given their history, they won't let a little thing like abject failure stop them.

What the fruit flies actually say

It's common practice to use quotes from experts to support an argument.  I do it, in nearly every post. But the problem is that if you are only looking at a clipped quote from a larger piece, you may not be getting the whole story.

And sometimes the person using the quote intends exactly that.

I ran into an especially good example of that yesterday, in the goofy creationist website Pathlights -- more specifically, on the page entitled "Fruit Flies Speak Up!"  In this bizarre little piece, the author claims that fruit fly research conclusively disproves evolution, because "After decades of study, without immediately killing or sterilizing them, 400 different mutational features have been identified in fruit flies.  But none of these changes the fruit fly to a different species."

Drosophila melanogaster [image courtesy of photographer André Karwath and the Wikimedia Commons]

Notwithstanding that the author evidently doesn't understand even the rudiments of evolutionary biology, what interested me more was the collection of quotes he used to support his point.  Some of them, for obvious reasons, came from creationist writings:

• Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried (1971)
• Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong (1982)
• Gordon R. Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery (1983)
• Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (1984)
• "Evolutionists Still Looking for a `Good Accident,'" Battle Cry, July-August, 1990

So far, nothing too surprising here.  Of the other quotes, the first thing that jumped out at me was that the ones from scientists and thinkers of high repute were all old.  Like, really old.  There was a quote from Richard Goldschmidt from 1952, ones from Maurice Caullery and Theodosius Dobzhansky from 1964.  What, you can't find any quotes under fifty years old from reputable scientists to support your contention?

I wonder why that is.

And even those old quotes are misinterpreted or taken out of context.  For example, let's look at the Dobzhansky quotes.  If Theodosius Dobzhansky actually said something that shot down evolution, it would be astonishing; he was one of the founders of the modern evolutionary model, and in fact his most famous quote is, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."  So let's see what quotes the author did choose.  Here's the first one:

The clear-cut mutants of Drosophila, with which so much of the classical research in genetics were done, are almost without exception inferior to wild-type flies in viability, fertility, longevity.  (Theodosius Dobzhansky, Heredity and the Nature of Man (1964))  

Well, duh.  The scientists who conducted the experiments were doing artificial selection -- i.e., selecting the mutant strains because they were interested in the phenotypic expression of the mutation.  Put a different way, they were not selecting the flies for fitness, which is what happens in natural settings.  Just as artificial selection in dogs has resulted in breeds with poorer fitness than "wild-type" dogs -- predisposition to diseases like hip dysplasia being a well-studied example -- there is no evolutionary biologist in the world who would expect that what is being done in labs that study Drosophila is going to produce populations with higher fitness than the wild-type flies that have been naturally selected for survival for millennia.

Here's the second quote:

Most mutants which arise in any organism are more or less disadvantageous to their possessors. The classical mutants obtained in Drosophila usually show deterioration, breakdown, or disappearance of some organs.  Mutants are known which diminish the quantity or destroy the pigment in the eyes, and in the body reduce the wings, eyes, bristles, legs.  Many mutants are, in fact lethal to their possessors.  Mutants which equal the normal fly in vigor are a minority, and mutants that would make a major improvement of the normal organization in the normal environments are unknown.  (Theodosius Dobzhansky, Evolution, Genetics, and Man (1955))

The author of the site is using this to claim that mutations are always bad, but read Dobzhansky's quote and you will find him using words like most, more or less, usually, many, a minority.  Read critically, you will see that Dobzhansky clearly knew about neutral variation, which are traits that confer neither an advantage nor a disadvantage to the individual.

In fact, let's look at a different Dobzhansky quote, that demonstrates the point rather clearly:

The data reported in the present article have a bearing on the problem of selection, even though they involve no selection experiments in the usual sense of the term.  Some of the chromosomes obtained through crossing over between the three ancestral wild chromosomes have properties very dif- ferent from the latter.  It is, therefore, possible to “select” products of recombination of the gene complexes that deviate greatly from the ancestral types, being completely outside the limits of variability of these ancestors.  (from "The Genetics of Natural Populations," Genetics, May 1946)

Dobzhansky was no doubter of evolutionary theory.  He simply knew enough about genetics to understand that artificially-induced, artificially-selected mutations were unlikely to improve fitness, and that much of the variation you see in nature is due to recombination.

Most interesting is a quote from Jeremy Rifkin's book Algeny.  Rifkin himself is an economist and social activist, so right away you have to wonder why his word on evolutionary genetics should be authoritative.  But here it is:

Even with this tremendous speedup of mutations, scientists have not been able to come up with anything other than another fruit fly.  Most important, what all these experiments demonstrate is that the fruit fly can vary within certain upper and lower limits but will never go beyond them.  For example, Ernst Mayr reported on two experiments performed on the fruit fly back in 1948. 

In the first experiment, the fly was selected for a decrease in bristles and, in the second experiment, for an increase in bristles.  Starting with a parent stock averaging 36 bristles, it is possible after thirty generations to lower the average to 25 bristles, "but then the line became sterile and died out."  In the second experiment, the average number of bristles were increased from 36 to 56; then sterility set in.  Mayr concluded with the following observation: Obviously any drastic improvement under selection must seriously deplete the store of genetic variability...  The most frequent correlated response of one-sided selection is a drop in general fitness.  This plagues virtually every breeding experiment.  (Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny (1983))

Once again, we have the same three problems; confusing artificial with natural selection, ignoring the effects of recombination on variation, and using words like "most frequent."  And it must be said that when Algeny was published, it was roundly trashed by the scientific community.  Stephen Jay Gould reviewed it thusly:

I regard Algeny as a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship. Among books promoted as serious intellectual statements by important thinkers, I don't think I have ever read a shoddier work.  Damned shame, too, because the deep issue is troubling and I do not disagree with Rifkin's basic pleas for respecting the integrity of evolutionary lineages.  But devious means compromise good ends, and we shall have to save Rifkin's humane conclusion from his own lamentable tactics.  (Discover, January 1985)

Ouch.  Given Gould's stature in the scientific community, I think that puts Rifkin and Algeny into perspective.

So the original post on Pathlights was disingenuous at best.  Illustrating the unsurprising point that if you cherry-pick your quotes, you can support damn near anything.  Which, ironically, is exactly what the fundamentalists do with their own favorite source, the bible -- insisting that we interpret literally the creation story and Noah's ark and prohibitions against homosexuality, while simultaneously ignoring things like the kosher laws and rules spelling out how you can beat your slaves and mandates to stone disobedient children.

No particular shock, I suppose, that they do the same thing to other sources.  But it does call into serious question their intellectual honesty, doesn't it?

Be vewwwy quiet. I'm hunting Neanderthals.

Sometimes it seems to me that a significant fraction of the media is not even trying to be accurate any more.

Oh, I know there are responsible reporters.  But ye gods and little fishes, some of them are awful.

Take, for example, Mike Hallowell's piece last week in the Shields Gazette, a newspaper out of Sunderland, England.  The article's title was -- and I swear I'm not making this up -- "Was Neanderthal Shot by a Time Traveler?"

In this bizarre little piece, we find out that in 1922, some archaeologists found a Neanderthal skull in Broken Hill, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).  This put me on alert right away; Neanderthals didn't live in Africa, they were a species confined entirely to Europe (if they constitute a distinct species at all, a point still being debated).

But that was only the beginning of the lunacy in Hallowell's article.  Because he claimed that this "Neanderthal skull" had a bullet hole in it.  Here's a direct quote:

On the left side of the cranium was a small, perfectly round hole. At first it was assumed that it had been made by a spear, or other sharp implement, but further investigation proved that this had not been the case. 

When a skull is struck by a relatively low-velocity projectile – such as an arrow, or spear – it produces what are known as radial cracks or striations; that is, minute hairline fractures running away from the place of impact. 

As there were no radial fractures on the Neanderthal skull, it was unanimously concluded that the projectile must have had a far, far greater velocity than an arrow or spear. But what? 

Another mystery was that the right side of the cranium had, in the words of one anthropologist, “been blown away”. Further research also proved that that the right side of the cranium had been “blown away” from the inside out. 

In short, whatever had hit the Broken Hill Neanderthal on the left side of his head had passed through it with such force that it had caused the right side to explode.

He then quotes René Noorbergen, author of Secrets of the Lost Races, who said, "This same feature is seen in modern victims of head wounds received from shots from a high-powered rifle.  The cranial damage to Rhodesian Man’s skull could not have been caused by anything but a bullet."

The skull of "Rhodesian Man," showing the alleged entry wound [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So, Hallowell concludes, the bullet came from the gun of a time traveler who had gone on a "trans-temporal hunting expedition."

Righty-o.  Because that makes sense.  It took me all of five minutes on Google to find out that this claim is Grade-A Unadulterated Bullshit.  Over at the wonderful blog Bad Thinking, we find out that everything about Hallowell's article is... wrong.

Rhodesian Man was discovered in 1921, not 1922.  The skull, as I realized right from the outset, wasn't a Neanderthal, it was Homo rhodesiensis, a species that is thought to be the common ancestor of both Neanderthals and modern humans.  The "bullet hole" actually shows signs of partial healing, and therefore the skull's owner survived whatever caused it.  Scientists (who, unlike Hallowell, actually know what they're talking about) suspect it was caused by a bacterial infection.

Worst of all, the opposite side of the skull is intact.  There's no exit wound, no part of the skull that's "blown away."  The unnamed archaeologist quoted in Hallowell's article either never actually looked at the right side of the skull, or more likely, he is as nonexistent as the rest of the evidence in this claim.

I suppose there's always been lousy, low-standards journalism, but because of the internet such foolishness now can travel much further than ever before.  This means it's even more important to insist on accuracy in reporting, and being willing to accept nothing but excellence in every media source.

I know that media also exists to entertain, and there's nothing wrong with amusing speculation, whose aim is only to make us scratch our heads a little.  But before Hallowell even got to the speculation part of the article, he misled the reader with outright falsehoods multiple times, and that is inexcusable.

As I've said more than once, I am all for keeping in mind our biases and assumptions.  I have a bias always to look for the natural explanation that is consistent with what we currently know of the laws of science.  People who accept the existence of the paranormal have a different set of biases.

But neither viewpoint benefits from liars and hoaxers, who serve no other purpose than to muddy the waters, making actual understanding less likely for everyone.

&%$#@*&!

Note:  because this post is about swearing, it contains some swear words.  Be thou forewarned.

*******************************

I sometimes use some "strong language" in this blog, and every once in a while someone will comment on it.  I try not to make it gratuitous, but there are times when the only intensifier that seems appropriate is one that is... inappropriate.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

For example, I ended my post on the people using Robin Williams's suicide to score philosophical points with the phrase "shut the fuck up."  Could I have phrased it another way?  Sure.  But my opinion (and opinion it is) is that writing is an art form, for which language is the tool.  A writer uses his/her words to effect a response in the reader -- curiosity, anger, understanding, sadness, laughter, or any of a thousand other possibilities.  A careful writer therefore has to choose words that have punch and clarity.  And I would argue that there is no phrase that could be substituted for "shut the fuck up" that has the same dagger-like stab at the heartless individuals who were the subject of that post.

It's a fine line, though.  Swearing can become a habit.  When I was at the University of Washington, I fell in amongst a group of graduate students for whom swearing and obscenity peppered every conversation.  Simple statements were laden with all manner of bad language; you didn't "have to go to class," you "fuckin' had to go to class."  It was all too easy to fall in with that habit to fit in, and for a time I hardly uttered a phrase that didn't have some kind of inappropriate word in it.

And in this context, the word "inappropriate" is exactly the right descriptor.  It was gratuitous, unnecessary, used only to show how Tough and Modern and Rebellious the speaker was.  It added nothing, gave no emotional zing to the language.  It was a filler, no more laden with meaning than "uh" and "um" and "know what I mean?"

It's significant, of course, that so many swear words have sexual connotations, because let's face it: Americans have a hangup about sex.  But I think that labeling of words as "appropriate" or "inappropriate," "clean" or "obscene" goes far deeper than that.

The reality is, whether any language use is appropriate or inappropriate is contextual.  I discuss this at length in my Critical Thinking classes, starting with an example a little like my use of the f-bomb in my post two days ago.  I play for the class the song "Some Nights" by the band Fun, in which there is no "bad language" until the very end:

Five minutes in and I'm bored again
Ten years of this, I'm not sure if anybody understands
This one is not for the folks at home;
Sorry to leave, mom, I had to go,
Who the fuck wants to die alone all dried up in the desert sun?

The song is about war -- something that is not completely apparent unless you watch the music video.  But I would argue that that single use of a swear word turns that last line into a sucker punch, and the lyrics would have less emotional impact by the use of any other word.

As an illustration of how "inappropriateness" is completely contextual, another thing we discuss is the episode from Seinfeld called "The Bet."  In this famous episode, which may be the best-known one in the entire series, Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, and George make a bet over which of them can go the longest without masturbating.  Throughout the entire show, not once does any character use the word "masturbate" or any of its synonyms.  Although the whole show is about a topic that people like the eminent prude Brent Bozell would find distasteful and obscene, the censors couldn't find any legitimate reason to stop it from airing, or even anything to bleep out.

Was "The Bet," in fact, obscene?  The difficulty of answering that question was summed up in 1964 in the case Jacobellis vs. Ohio, which was about whether the movie The Lovers was obscene and deserved to be banned.  The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and in the majority opinion, Justice Potter Stewart said:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

We like everything to fit in neat little boxes with labels.  Words are either appropriate, or they're not; movies, television shows, books, and music are either obscene, or they're not.  Predictably, the reality is much more complex than that.  The impact that any media has on the person consuming it is always contextual, depending on the intent and skill of the person who created the media, and the background, attitudes, intelligence, and sensitivity of the person consuming it.  There are people who have been offended by my occasional use of a "bad word" here on Skeptophilia, and others who have applauded it; only to be expected, when every reader brings a different perspective to a piece of writing.

But I'm not going to apologize for occasionally offending.  As a writer both of essays and fiction, I try to use language with what skill I have, and am careful when choosing words that I know carry a lot of weight.  Sometimes what I intend is for the reader to have a visceral reaction -- whether that reaction is outrage, or a belly laugh from surprise.  If I've achieved that end, I've succeeded, even if I sometimes use a word that would have gotten my mouth washed out with soap when I was ten years old.