This commandment has long been regarded as an
injunction against profanity and taking God's name
lightly. I have never been able to understand why
anyone should descend to the use of profanity.
It is neither smart nor funny. It takes no brains
whatever to swear. If a man must translate anger and
irritation into speech, it would relieve his feelings
quite as effectively to use a few mathematical terms,
carefully selected instead of the coarse and vulgar terms
usually employed.
The story is told of a famous fisherwoman in
Billingsgate Fish Market, London, who had a great
reputation in the use of profanity. No one had ever been
able to stand before the outbursts of her sulphurous
vocabulary. She deluged and dazed them by her whirlwind
of unsavory and uncomplimentary adjectives.
There was a professor of mathematics at London
University who determined to try issues with her on her
own grounds and beat her at her own game without using a
single oath. So, one morning, he strolled down to the
fish market. Standing before the dreaded woman's stall,
he inquired the price of a particular fish. When she held
it up before him, he sniffed and remarked that the fish
was in an advanced stage of decomposition. The storm
began to rise, and when he made a still more
uncomplimentary remark about some other article of her
stock, she surveyed him from head to foot, and with arms
akimbo, she described him in terms that made the very eels
squirm and the lobsters blush. To which the professor
calmly replied by calling her "an oblique angle of an
equilateral triangle."
Dilated with rage, she let drive at him with a volley
of expletives and a round of epithets that attracted the
attention of the entire market, and then leaned forward
and shook her fist at him. The professor, entirely
unmoved, simply said "Blaze away, you windy old hypotenuse
of an isosceles triangle you rhomboid trapezium, you
rectangular parallelogram. Who cares for you ?"
Then she called up all her reserves, calling him, "the
gall of a devilfish, a rotten shrimp, a tub full of fish
tails, a spawn of a dog fish" and so on, fairly gasping
for breath as she concluded. But the professor blandly
remarked, "You diagonal of a polygon, you homologous
tetragon, you parametric polyhedron, you incommensurable
frustrum of a pyramid." But she could stand no more.
Dazed, overwhelmed by a volume of terms she had never
heard, and of whose awful meanings she had no conception,
she sank back on her bench, white and red with rage and
awe, but speechless.
Then the professor said, still looking at her with an
unmoved expression, "When I call again, I hope you will
know better than to call me names, you truncated hexagonal
prism, you directrix of a parabola, you trigonometric
function of a complementary angle, you cylindrical cone,
you eccentrical ellipse, you radius of a hyperbola, you
---".
But the woman fainted dead away, and ever after the sight
of the professor passing through the market reduced her to
silence and fear. Not for all the world would she have
his awful torrent of dreadful words let loose on her
again.
(The above is taken from a sermon by a Methodist minister
who wound up the above with this recommendation: "I would
recommend this method of relieving the feelings to any
person who is in the habit of using profanity to express
himself.")
