For the past two years, I've taught beginning English composition at Utah Valley University. One of my jobs in these courses is to help students to become sensitive to "rhetoric." I had not thrown the word "rhetoric" around loosely or tightly before, so I had some things to learn as well. Basically, "rhetoric" refers to how we use language, the tone we strike with language. An ad with a gekko advertising car insurance, does not use the same tone as a person bearing solemn testimony in a church meeting.
There are, for example, various ways of saying, "I have to go to the bathroom." This was brought to my abrupt attention during one class, when a male student stood up and was making his way out of the room.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
FOR THOSE OF YOU WITH SENSITIVE EARS, STOP READING HERE.
He said, "I gotta take a piss."
SENSITIVE EARS MAY RESUME READING HERE.
This startled me, because it was both a) clearly stated, and b) strikingly out of place for how I would speak to a professor. Nonetheless, I waved him on. The next class period, I took advantage of the previous situation by using it to discuss rhetoric. The question I asked was, "How many ways can you say, 'I have to go to the bathroom'"? We arranged and ranked the list from 10) extremely proper to 1) crude. So, for example, the top of the list might be, "May I excuse myself for a moment?" to my student's blunt statement of fact at the bottom of the list.
I am now passing along to those of you whose rapt attention has not waned, a very short piece that appeared in Harper's Magazine in June 1992. It struck me terribly funny, but I realize that my sense of humor is skewed, possibly skewered. It is preceded by a brief explanation in Italics:
From the “definitions”
section of an ordinance on public nudity passed in March by the St. Johns
County, Florida, board of commissioners. The ordinance prohibits the public
display of genitals, breasts, and buttocks, and specifically forbids
“G-strings, T-backs, dental floss, and thongs.”
Buttocks: The area at the rear of the human
body (sometimes referred to as the gluteus maximus) which lies between two
imaginary straight lines running parallel to the ground when a person is
standing, the first or top such line being a half-inch below the top of the
vertical cleavage of the nates (i.e., the prominence formed by the muscles
running from the back of the hip to the back of the leg) and the second or
bottom such line being a half-inch above the lowest point of the curvature of
the fleshy protuberance (sometimes referred to as the gluteal fold) and between two imaginary straight
lines, one on each side of the body (the straight lines, one on each side of
the body (the “outside lines”), which outside lines are perpendicular to the
ground and to the horizontal lines described above, and which perpendicular
outside lines pass through the outermost point(s) at which each nate meets the
outer side of each leg. Notwithstanding the above, buttocks shall not include the
leg, the hamstring muscle below the gluteal fold, the tensor fasciae latae
muscles, or any of the above described portion of the human body that is
between either (i) the left inside perpendicular line and the left outside
perpendicular line or (ii) the right inside perpendicular line and the right
outside perpendicular line. For the purpose of the previous sentence, the left
inside perpendicular line shall be an imaginary straight line on the left side
of the anus (i) that is perpendicular to the ground and to the horizontal lines
described above and (ii) that is one third of the distance from the anus to the
left outside line. (The above description can generally be described as
covering one third of the buttocks centered over the cleavage for the length of
the cleavage.)
