This blog has relentlessly and unabashedly pursue the principle that every speaker is what they say. This underlies the title of my book, The Speaking Self. If more evidence for the rightness of this view were needed, Y-H-B encountered it on the streets of Manhattan this morning when going to fetch his car from a garage on East 73rd Street, when he passed a woman on Lexington Avenue who looked to be in her fifties or sixties talking on her cell phone and uttering the phrase “fucking putzoid,” which Y-H-B had never heard before. The word putz is known and used well enough, but the combination “fucking putzoid” was new to me. That a woman would utter such a profanity was strange to me, but it must have been something that she had used before. That she was willing to say such a thing was indirect but powerful evidence of her forma mentalis. QED.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO