Vulgarities

I can be a coarse person.

When I was in the military, it was routine for me to use the common vulgarities. I haven't been in the military for more than twenty years, but the memory lingers on. Sometimes, it comes up when no other phrase will do. For example: when describing a situation where multiple people are working on the same thing, but independent of each other, unaware of each other, and not communicating with each other, the phrase that comes to mind is Clusterfuck. To my mind, no word, no combination of words says it better. I occasionally wonder why that is; the best I've ever heard (and I admit that I haven't done more than just a little reading on the subject) is that there is a visceral pleasure in words with an explosive, guttural sound. I think that the word 'fricative' is an omonotopeic (sp?) way of saying it. Whatever the reason, when things are bollixed up, and people are running in circles or working at cross purposes, clusterfuck -- sometimes, goddamned clusterfuck -- is the phrase that comes to mind.

What brings this to mind is a page I found wherein a person describes a PDF that he's created to assist in taking notes using the Cornell method. I admit, I'd not heard of that phrase prior to seeing the page, but I've seen the concept -- that being, that notes are taken quickly, and then summarized in a wide margin along one side, so that you can easily scan content without having to reread all of the notes. In the page, the person refers to 'help my cheap ass....' That jarred me. I am sure that to him it was a casual phrase, and its possible that he meant it as a witty, albeit true, comment: he is unwilling to spend money on something that he wants, and the way he describes that state is 'my cheap ass'.

What I don't really understand -- don't have a good feeling for -- is why people do that. Why do they denigrate themselves like that? Or is it possible that they don't see it as denigrating, any more than describing their hair color or the length of their nose? Is it possible that they would regard saying that concept in a more socially acceptable way - ' help me purchase something that I don't want to spend money to get' - as pompous and fake?

I don't know. But I wonder about it.