Lovely French

I was walking out to my car at lunch time today, and I overheard a bit of conversation between two gentlemen from the west side of the building in which I work. The west side is home to the Purchasing and Service Departments. I didn’t know either of them. They were getting into a car and conversing loud enough that I could hear them from half-way across the parking lot, when one of them, totally unprovoked, dropped the F-bomb.

“Oh, that’s lovely French,” I thought to myself. Then I added, “Dude, I have no idea who you are, but you’ve just made your first impression, and it’s not a good one.”

Do you remember the old Verbal Advantage commercials? It was a vocabulary building system that used to advertise extensively on the radio years ago. Their commercials (as I remember them) always included the line, “It’s true! People do judge you by the words you use.” It remains just as true today.

I am also reminded of something that was written by Archbishop Charles Chaput not so very long ago: “Vulgar language suggests a vulgar soul.” It isn’t always necessarily so, but it is more often than not.