People are Funny

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I recently started a discussion on another site by sharing a quote: "Civilized people do not used profanity and intelligent people don't need to." Most of the feedback I got was pretty positive. The point I was making was that civilized people are civil and use civil language, which profanity is not. If we are truly intelligent then we should be able to express ourselves clearly and succinctly without the use of profanity because profanity is the lowest form of communication and, in fact, is non-communication and basically verbal violence. One woman came on and informed me that she considered herself civilized and intelligent but she used profanity on occasion, equating it to racial slurs. She could not see that racial slurs were also uncivilized and belying the intelligence of the person who spouted them. My daughter piped in to tell her that racial slurs were, in fact, illegal which in my daughter's view as a young girl was accurate. You see, she had been involved with an assault case where the fact that the woman who assaulted her had been harassing her with racial slurs became a factor and, in that sense, would make the racial slurs illegal even though there is not a law specifically written that would make the racial slurs by themselves prosecutable. Are you with me so far? This woman came back and insisted that racial slurs were not illegal and we didn't know what we were talking about. Then she said she was through arguing and said something about "beating a dead horse". Okay, I figured she was done with us and had moved on. Since her last comment was a non-comment and the anger was evident in it, I deleted it...accidentally deleting the comment before it, as well. Suddenly she was back! Angrier than ever at me for deleting her comment! I apologized and said I thought she was through with us. She returned mad as a wet hornet with an expletive that got the new comment also deleted. Now, what she was so hot under the collar for, I will not presume to say. We obviously had different definitions of what constituted civilized and intelligent. I had to laugh, though, because she used as evidence of her intelligence her college degrees. She obviously did not know what constitutes intelligence vs knowledge. I have know many highly intelligent people who never set foot in a college classroom as well as many (what I call) degreed idiots! Case in point, our illustrious government! Why is it that some people seem to think that if they get that degree that it means that they are intelligent? All the knowledge in the world does no one any good without some wisdom to temper it. Otherwise our world would be much better run by the PTB because, as I understand it, to get elected these days you have to have some kind of degree.