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« Beating a Kiai Master About the Head and Neck With the Foot of Reality • The Rants • Is This Thing On? »
We'd Rather Wait for Lemon-Soaked Napkins
2007.04.09 (Mon) 19:38
Language Log took a moment to point us over to a Reuters article that just...fucking...floored us.
Northwest Airlines cancelled a flight set to leave from Las Vegas to Detroit after the captain cursed on a cell phone in a bathroom, then swore at one of the 180 passengers on the plane, officials said on Saturday.
Are you fucking kidding us? We have so many questions for the utter fucking morons who think this makes any sense whatsoever, but we'll be happy to address just a few of them.
First off: a pop quiz for morons, particularly addressed to those who have some sort of problem with profanity (for whatever reason). Given the choice, would you rather:
a) have your flight cancelled because somebody swore;
or
b) actually get to your destination at the time you had planned to arrive?
Seriously, is "potty-mouth" that fucking important to you? Apparently so:
[Ian Gregor, FAA spokesman, says,] "At some point during the boarding process, he left the cockpit, went into the front lavatory, locked the door and continued his conversation.
"Passengers who were boarding the aircraft could hear his end of the conversation through the lavatory door."
When the captain emerged from the bathroom, a passenger confronted him about his behaviour, reportedly prompting more cursing by the pilot of the B757 aircraft.
Here's an even easier question: how many people on that flight do you think would rather beat the shit out of the passenger who complained to the pilot rather than the pilot, if given the choice? Because we're willing to bet a hefty fucking sum that, out of the 180 passengers aboard, at least 150 of them would agree with our preference here. For fuck's sake, some of these people were delayed by an entire day because some dimwitted prude took exception to the rude language used by the pilot (which was not initially directed at the dimwitted prude). To add to the impact of this overreaction, this was Easter weekend — we've got a pretty good guess that at least some of these people were trying to get somewhere on Saturday so they could celebrate Easter with their friends and relatives on Sunday; thanks to the outlandish reaction to this asinine non-issue, they instead found themselves stranded in the airport on Easter Sunday rather than spending time with their loved ones. Yeah, that makes a lot of fucking sense. God for-fucking-bid our passengers should ever hear "dirty words," but we won't think twice about fucking up their celebration of his only begotten son's resurrection for no good reason.
Who knows what particular words or phrases upset this prudish, prissy, puritanical passenger? Well, thanks to the wonders of ludicrous media censorship, we may never fucking know.
"He used what was described to me as rude language," Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said about Friday's incident on Northwest Flight 1190.
"He used what was described to me as rude language"? Therein lies the ridiculous stupidity of problems like this one. People are so stupidly "careful" about profanity that we can't even learn what the pilot said in order to judge for ourselves the merits of the offense or the resulting executive decision! Seriously, does Ian Gregor even know exactly what the pilot said? Or has it been only "vaguely referenced" to him, as well? People: they're fucking words. Get over it.
This entire article is completely nonsensical and pointless if we don't even know what it is the pilot said, either on the phone or to the plaintive passenger. How "detailed" can this article be — how much of an opinion can we really form on this incident — if Reuters can't even publish the words they're reporting on? At this point, we'd even settle for some suggestive asterisks, "at-signs," and exclamation points, as long as the number of characters printed was equivalent to the number of characters they're replacing (you know, so we could try to puzzle it out). There comes a point where "freedom of the press" should include being able to print any fucking word necessary in order to accurately report a story. Language police: stop obscuring our fucking language and thereby making it even harder to understand any fucking thing we read or hear!
And speaking of police:
Local police questioned the captain, whose name was not released, and determined there was no cause to conduct a sobriety test, Gregor said.
Uh, no shit, fuckholes. What, only drunk people swear? Do you have fucking holes in your heads where your brains slowly leak out?
There are so many potential reasons to swear (we at the Two Percent Company employ all of them, obviously); and, more importantly, there may be utterly reasonable and understandable reasons to swear even in a "customer relations" environment such as the one the pilot found himself in.
On the phone, that was his fucking conversation, and for all we know (since Reuters can't seem to give us any details, and the FAA won't), he'd just found out that his wife of 15 years had been cheating on him for 10 with his old co-pilot, was filing for divorce, and was going to seek sole custody (with no visitation) of their three wonderful children — as far as we're concerned, that scenario certainly justifies a bit of profanity from any sane person. Again, we don't know what the pilot's situation was, but there are any number of possibilities that may explain — not necessarily justify, but certainly explain — his initial behavior. Profanity, as a psychological release of tension and/or anger, seems to be a great deterrent of physical violence — get it out verbally, and you won't have to get it out physically. When we badly stub a toe or get a finger briefly trapped in the trash compactor, we're certainly emotionally incited to hit something — but we let out some pretty fantastic swears instead, and the visceral need for physical violence dissipates quite rapidly.
To the passenger who complained — we don't think we should even have to explain this, but fine, here goes. Hey, asshole! You should have shut the fuck up and kept your bullshit puritanical pedantry out of the pilot's face. You have no idea what the pilot was involved in, no idea what situation he was dealing with, and no idea what elicited the "dirty" words. You just took it upon yourself to "police" the actions of another person. Get over yourself, you fucking asshat.
Should the pilot have cursed out the passenger? Well, no, and we completely understand that — there are standards to be upheld in any field that includes customer relations. These standards have nothing to do with strong language, however — we refer only to "comfort level" and manners, an understanding of which includes policing your own language as appropriate to the environment and situation.
However, we also completely understand that an infinite number of possible circumstances could push us to lose our cool and, frankly, to not give a shit about "decorum" or business relations. Holding another person, in any profession, to a higher standard than we hold ourselves would be ludicrous.
So again: should the pilot have cursed out the passenger? No, probably not. And perhaps the passenger was justified in broaching the subject with the pilot; again, we can't know, since nobody will explicitly tell us what fucking transpired. But should the fucking flight have been cancelled due to an exchange of fucking words? Not on your life, bucko. To us, it's just another tick-mark on the bedpost of Nanny State Overkill.
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[ Filed under: % Bullshit % Media & Censorship ]
Comments (18)
TimmyAnn, 2007.04.09 (Mon) 22:24 [Link] »
Brian, 2007.04.09 (Mon) 23:30 [Link] »
TimmyAnn, 2007.04.09 (Mon) 23:50 [Link] »
Tom Foss, 2007.04.10 (Tue) 02:19 [Link] »
Bronze Dog, 2007.04.10 (Tue) 09:44 [Link] »
Rockstar Ryan, 2007.04.10 (Tue) 12:51 [Link] »
Jenna, 2007.04.10 (Tue) 12:52 [Link] »
Jenna, 2007.04.10 (Tue) 13:48 [Link] »
Belinda, 2007.04.10 (Tue) 19:12 [Link] »
The Two Percent Company, 2007.04.10 (Tue) 20:23 [Link] »
jenna, 2007.04.10 (Tue) 21:53 [Link] »
jenna, 2007.04.10 (Tue) 21:56 [Link] »
Infophile, 2007.04.13 (Fri) 19:49 [Link] »
TimmyAnn, 2007.04.13 (Fri) 20:03 [Link] »
Jason Spicer, 2007.04.13 (Fri) 23:57 [Link] »
Tom Foss, 2007.04.14 (Sat) 00:15 [Link] »
Belinda, 2007.04.15 (Sun) 19:23 [Link] »
IYce, 2007.06.01 (Fri) 10:21 [Link] »
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