This commandment has long been regarded as an injunction--
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.")