[lit-ideas] Re: Words, wirds, werds


On 24-Jun-09, at 6:13 AM, Mike Geary wrote:
I'm always perplexed and amused by those who write G*d for God. What's so sacred about "o" I wonder that it cannot be shown to the world. Surely G*d means God to those who use the Trigrammaton. If speaking a word or seeing it in its naked reality, drags an idea out into the world and clothes it in the corruption of our fleshly existence, then how in hell is thinking that word not a thousand times more blasphemous? For what could be more filthy and rotted with evil than a man's mind?
Cf. Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, "What's the Ugliest Part of Your Body?" 

What's the ugliest
Part of your body?
Some say your nose
Some say your toes
(I think it's your mind)
But I think it's YOUR MIND
(Your mind)
I think it's your mind, woo woo
(This particular formulation -especially the "woo woo" - is posted courtesy of some anonymous website which I cam across while checking to see if my memory was serving me correctly. It - i.e., my memory - was; aside for the "woo woo".)
... we encounter "G*d", especially in the South, as, I suppose, an acknowledgement of a sacredness too sacred to be acknowledged, as an act of reverence too reverent to be referenced in human sound. It is our goy version of YHWH. 

I had not realized that there were Christians who used this formulation.
How does one pronounce "G*d"? Gasterisked? "I believe in Gasterisked, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth." Will they change our money to read: "In Gasterisked we trust"?
I believe that the intention (if it is copied from the practice found in Hebrew scripture and commentary) is that a reader-aloud, in encountering 'G*d' (i.e. the string of symbols), is forewarned and will not ATTEMPT to pronounce it (and thus commit blasphemy).
But I am especially driven to respond to this post because your musings about pronunciation have done me a great service, Mr Geary, for which I must thank you.
I have, on occasion, what some would call a foul mouth (I'm not apologizing or excusing - I am who I am - but merely describing). Now, the next time the little old lady next door pushes her Harley over to me to inspect because yet once again she can't get it started (it's her own fault, as I often tell her, for not buying a BMW) - when she asks what's wrong with it, instead of treading upon her sensibilities with my heretofore crudeness of expression, I can, after barking my knuckles in her service for the umpteenth time, hold up in my bleeding hand the offending part to her nose, and politely and accurately exclaim, 

"The fasterixcking fasterixcker's fasterixcked!"
Similarly, I will no longer have to restrain myself from issuing the only possibly appropriate retort to some insult from either infarction- prone bishop or burly rocker with a neck two sizes larger than his hat.
"Perhaps you would be so kind as to just shut the fasterixck up, you motherfasterixcker!" will serve in either case - by the time the penny drops (if at all) for the bishop, the danger of provoking a stroke or heart attack will have been severely diminished; in the case of the rocker (whose witty repartee would no doubt include the breaking of several of my bones), I'll have made tracks long before (if ever) he figures it out! 

Karl Trogge
Hamburg
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