Potter Stewart To The Rescue
Harold Hark
21 July 2003

To the horror of those near and dear to me, I am a habitual user of the f*** word. I can't help it, the word just pops out of my foul gob with sickening regularity, a hangover from my days as an unsavoury youth.

What makes using the f*** word especially awful is that I don't even like it--how an-euphonious can four letters sound? (Or is it un-euphonious?) It is truly an ugly word.

At home, we've tried the "pay up or shut up" routine, where I have to put 20 cents in a jar every time the word slips out. But there were never enough coins on hand, and calculating the number of incidents so that dollar bills could be used instead proved too difficult. We then decided I should just put a 20 dollar bill in the jar every Monday morning, but within a day or two, the bill was removed for groceries or some other necessity.

Over the years it has remained in all its permutations as a heinous role model for my young daughter and a source of embarrassment for my genteel wife.

I've even searched the yellow pages for F***-Word Users Anonymous, to no avail.

Just when I had given up all hope, a solution presented itself in Robert Anton Wilson's mind-cubing book, "Schrödinger's Cat". The author uses his knowledge of physics, in particular quantum mechanics, to modify the same ingenious plot in various parallel universes as he attempts "to find out just what the f*** is going on". That is, why we continue to behave as plodding ants when our brains can take us anywhere we want to go.

In the last third of the book, using the same characters in yet another parallel universe, Wilson substitutes all overtly sexual words with the names of anti-pornography public figures. The result is hilarious.

I will try to collate the complete list at a later date, but for the moment, here are a few: For penis, substitute Rehnquist. Breasts are called Brownmillers. To masturbate is to Briggs. The act of fellating a Rehnquist becomes Bryanting, while reaching orgasm is described as having one fine Millet.

My favourite substitution is, of course, for the notorious f*** word. It becomes Potter Stewart. As in, "What the Potter Stewart is that Potter Stewarting John Howard doing to this country?"

Thanks to Wilson, I have successfully re-imprinted my brain. Where before others cringed and recoiled, they now laugh as I leap forth with proclamations on how Potter Stewarted everything is.

An added boon is that my tendency to verbosity--Hark's motto: Why use one adjective when ten will do--fits well with the replacement of one syllable with four or five.

All together now: Peter Costello Briggsed Philip Ruddock's Rehnquist while both gazed upon the heaving Brownmillers of Alexander Downer who was Bryanting John Howard as Richard Alston Potter Stewarted him to his first Millet in years.

Now that's pornography!

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