I do love it when you get all satirical on my ass!

Another gem from the master!

That was awesome.  I thought maybe it was from the Onion at first.

Brock, you comedic anthropologist you!  You’ve been studying fundamentalists, haven’t you?

(hushed British narrator’s voice) “Brock’s been studying this pack of fundies for neigh on three weeks; their compulsive worship habits, their church potluck dinners, and their Republican bumper stickers.  He’s been hoping to observe the extremely rare fundamentalist mating ritual...”

(Brock, hushed voice, laying on his belly looking through binoculars through high grass at a small white church with a tall steeple) “That’s right, Jim, and I think I’ve got it figured out.  They mate as often as anyone else, but they disguise it better and work on being ashamed of it...")

Must admit you gave me a start, though, since I live in Normal, Illinois

I used to be in a ragtime quartet, and back in the 70’s we had a gig for a couple months, playing for the Sunday Brunch in a gay nightclub in North Beach.

Naturally, I had my deviance sensors set on high, but to no avail- no one made passes at us, or laughed “too loud” (you know what I mean), or walked funny.  But one thing was abnormal- we got to eat brunch there too, and it was great.  Men who can cook that well… something’s not right there…

*Worships at the altar of Brock*

Thank you, I think I need to get a protective cover for my monitor, or else not drink while reading

DoF ain’t no slouch either in my book!

Brock, I know what your problem is - you just don’t know what a Normal Family looks like.  To help you out, the Town of Normal, Illinois has helpfully provided a sculpture by that name in front of the city hall/police station. 

(Snapped this picture on my way to breakfast this morning)

What, snapped a picture of a police station? You t*******t, you!

Thanks for appreciating my effort guys. I was afraid it would come across as too fantastic to merit any considerations or comments.

I wonder if anyone caught the message I was really trying to convey though, and that is that people have extreme prejudices and often react in unreasoned ways to guiltless exceptions to their views of what construes acceptable behavior.

One car passing through town becomes a certain opposing force and one religion becomes the absolutely accepted explanation for humanity’s presence and the sole rationalization for its continuance. One man, like one religion, becomes the justified/anointed defender of a nation’s fear-induced preoccupations.

Think it can’t happen?

It’s raining men, created in the image of One True God, and the earth is covered with them.

Thanks for demonstrating what a real family looks like too, decrepit. I’ve made the mistake of searching for animated/imaginative members. The Normal family expressed is much more unmodifiable, intractable and set in stone than I had in mind.

Sorry, Brock; I loved your post and thought it was clever and extremely funny!  But I confess I did miss the serious point.  I’m dense that way sometimes.

Prejudice is a ready-made frame we put around the picture that distorts our understanding of it.  What’s hard to realize is how complete the distortion is, and how difficult it is to get past it.

When the town put up that sculpture a lot of people protested for obvious reasons that you described above. Their concerns were just brushed aside.  The sculpture is 14 years old now and the name “The Normal Family” is starting (!) to sound a little, uh, dated.  At what point will the town make a difficult decision to revisit having made it the central symbol of our community?  Either remove it, or rename it?  One or the other will have to happen eventually.

The woman’s dangling foot was broken off a couple times by people standing on it until the town put in 2 video cameras to keep an eye on it and make sure no one damaged it.

I thought the normal family had two and one-half children. That mother doesn’t look pregnant. Normal, indeed! ! And is that baby suckling at the mother’s breast? How indescent! We all know that’s why God invented baby bottles, so we descent folk wouldn’t have to be embarrassed by biology. And what are those kids doing out of Daycare? Don’t they know it takes a village to make a village idiot? OOPS

Thanks to DoF and leguru for a great laugh, the kind that only happens when something is funny and sad at the same time.  I take exception, however, to your poking fun at the “Normal Family"- they look just like my family.  Well, sort of. 

And Brock- what you said.  However, I must niggle.  You thank us “guys” for our appreciation- you think there are no “gals” out here?  Oh wait- “gals” are “guys” now too.  Just goes to show how mixed up gender roles are now…

A final warning: when norms are torn, comes the abnormality calamity.

zilch - I also noticed the use of ‘guys’ to mean ‘guys and gals.’ We’re now hyper-aware because no shorthand is ever allowed if it contradicts political correctness.

In writing, ‘he’ used to be non gender-specific, as in: “If the shopper fails to consider sales tax before the purchase, he will encounter a nasty surprise.”

Then the literalists of the world took over and our language had the awful phrase, ‘he or she’ wired around its neck.  A truly gender-free singular pronoun that is easy to write and say would be a tremendously valuable contribution to the language. 

Anyway, I think ‘guys’ as including ‘gals’ is the same kind of thing.  (I work on a university campus and have learned to tiptoe around the sensitivities of those who take every word you say in its absolute literal sense.)

How about a term like bois. In French it mean wood, and to most of us wood is neither masculine nor feminine, it’s just wood. It is also a root for boistrous, which should produce lots of progeny.

Perfect!  (Well, in English, “wood” does have something to do with masculinity, if you know what I mean)

Now all we need to do is convince 280 million Americans to adopt a French word as their third-person pronoun…

I don’t think I’ve ever used the term “gal” in my life. Oddly, it seems more of a put down than “guys” does and I’ve used “guys” for as long as I can remember to refer to both sexes.

When I hear “gal”, I immediately think of the Broadway play “Guys and Dolls” for some reason, and then it seems even more wooden (leguru had a good point, but applied it to a different term) and sexist to me.

I’m one of those who is very aware of gender references and how they can be exclusionary. If I refer to non-defined individuals I normally say s/he or him/her.

But what should we call the transgendered? While “it” hardly seems appropriate, s/he needs a specifier, no? Still, can one truly ever become the other?

Maybe that’s why individuals have so much trouble accepting homosexuality. Because, to them, it’s likely that the socio/sexual inclination is falsely applied. To them, gays/lesbians don’t really desire companionship and sex with others of the same sex, but are just acting out desires to own missing masculine or feminine identities.

Gaaaaah! It’s all so confusing!

I fear yet that here, many will not even broach this subject, for fear of accidentally or finally coming off as politically incorrect. That’s why I think twice when I even write about it. Gender roles and gender perceptions are as important to talk about as anything we can discuss, though.

Forgot to mention how much I liked your enactment of a social observer, decrepit: I could picture the scene.

DoF- Yes, political correctness is a double-edged sword.  Insofar as it leads to tolerance, good.  But often it serves to delineate subjects as out-of-bounds for any sort of discussion.  That is stupid.  BTW, there are in-depth considerations of non-sexist language in “The Mind’s Eye” (a little dated now) and “Le Ton Beau de Marot”, both by Douglas Hofstadter, and worth reading for all kinds of wonderful insights.

leguru- good idea, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on the Americans warming to anything “froggish” at the moment.

Brock- you said you say “s/he or him/her”.  How do you pronounce “s/he”?  Just asking.

It is a problem, finding the right words to describe people without getting “-ist” on their asses.  I think sexist language, such as the assumed norm of the male for the undefined person (it’s no accident that we have “guy” and not “gal” for both sexes now- similarly “gay” and “lesbian"), probably does foster sexist attitudes.

It’s not the root of the problem, however.  I used to think that a culture with a neuter pronoun for “she and he” would likely be, all other things being equal (when is that ever the case, though?) at least a bit less sexist.  Since then, however, I’ve learned a bit of Hungarian, and spent a fair amount of time in Hungary.  The pronoun “ö” is neuter.  Are the Hungarians less sexist than their Slavic and Germanic neighbors?  Not as far as I can tell.

The linguist Steven Pinker has hit the nail on the head, I think, with his concept of the “euphemism treadmill”.  An example is the rapid cycling of terms for Americans of (recent) African ancestry- from black, to negro, to Afro-American, back to black.  What is happening here, Pinker says, is that each term in turn becomes unacceptable, because the racism in the society makes it a term of abuse, and thus tainted.  When racism is dead, whatever terms we have will stay put.

ey...ey...im new to dis..can anyone show me?????