Profannery

Mom invented a new word to describe some foul language she heard coming out of her television set recently. She referred to it as profannery. I googled this new word and got only one result so I’m going to credit mom with inventing it. My mom reads, has always worked crossword puzzles and is quite literate. She knows words I’ve never heard of but like a lot of older people she finds it hard, at least on some subconscious level, to utter any word that deals with sex. On rare occasions the effort to do so mangles syllables, mixes letters, and combines words resulting in a new word. Sometimes the result sounds even nastier than the more correct synonym. An example of this is my all time favorite word mom invented – Pedifeeler. Of course it means pedophile and it actually makes sense once you think about it. Go mom. There’s also the classic prevert that we’ve all heard. Mom has used prono (of course meaning porno) but I don’t think she invented that one, I’ll have to ask her. The funniest and most bizarre example of a mangled word I’ve heard was used repeatedly by a preacher I knew when I was a kid. He literally could not say the word sex. From time to time he would talk about how awful it was that these here young people were out there having sec. Even with the power of Jesus, he could not bring himself to pronounce the very last sound in the word sex. It was as if he were choking on the word itself. As a teenager this was freaking funny to listen to but it’d make me wonder - just who were these young people, where was out there and why wasn’t I with them? Then, as now, I wouldn’t mind having a little sec.