When Did Grandma Start Working at Twitter?

I was tootling along, minding my own business when it popped out at me. Well, okay. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I was tweeting along. I had just typed out a reply to a tweet when this message disrupted my joy.

This comment contains language that may be harmful or offensive. Are you sure you don’t want to water it down like ultra-light beer?

Or words to that effect.

There were two possibly harmful or offensive words: fucking or bastard. I was fairly confident I knew which word. I was also fairly confident I knew which word they wanted me to reconsider. Well, fuck that.

I try at most times to choose my words fairly carefully. Not always, but usually. If I choose to use that word it is specifically because I want to come across more emphatically. I want to draw readers up short, perhaps shock them a little, but definitely get their attention. I most certainly am not concerned that I might offend someone. As I’ve said before elsewhere, this is the 21st Century, we’re in the United States of America, and as of the last time I checked, I don’t need to have the Headmaster check my work for piety and grammar.

Do I want to reconsider that I might offend the reader? Hell, if I’m slinging the F bomb, it’s a really good chance someone just offended me and this is my response. In our America, where for some unknown reason 40-plus percent of Americans approve of the man who made this a comfy place to spew forth any racial, religious, sexual, political, or gender hatred, Twitter wants me to consider curbing my use of (tee hee) dirty words? Fuck them.

When I stop having to see tweets from white nationalists, QAnon assholes, gay-bashers, and plain old fucking lunatics talking about how anyone who isn’t a white christian male is an enemy of Amurika, when the GOP doesn’t openly pursue a campaign of preventing poor people, black people, brown people, and old people from voting because those people stand in the way of their maintaining a hegemony in American politics, I’ll start worrying about whether my tweets are going to make Aunt Millicent blush.