According to Hofmann: A matter of manners
Maybe some readers of this column would disagree, but, like William Shakespeare before me, I think some of my best writings come out of marital strife, passing gas, coughing, sneezing and burping.
If you think Shakespeare was above a good fart joke, then take a gander at this passage from “King Lear:” “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!”
If you think that was merely a coincidence, then I point to a character in the play “Twelfth Night” aptly named Sir Toby Belch, who’s fat, noisy and obnoxious.
I learned that in college. Now who says those four years were a waste of time and money?
Anyway, I’ve already gone completely off the rails as to the point of this column, which truly has it all: marital strife, passing gas, coughing, sneezing and burping. That almost sounds like a list of things NyQuil can cure, but sadly doesn’t.
I don’t even think I’d be writing this column if it weren’t for my wife, who’s proper and mindful of her manners and is psychologically obsessed with me doing the same.
Like everything else in a relationship from farting to burping and nose picking to living on the lam under an assumed name, you can’t keep things hidden forever.
Sure, I was able to fool my wife while we were dating, but she acted like she was unaware of the gaseous monster that she had married, and she made sure I’d say “excuse me” whenever something escaped from my body.
Don’t get me wrong, if I’m with strangers, people I casually know or a jury deciding my fate and something slips out, I excuse myself and pretend like I’m embarrassed, but when you’re constantly reminded to do so in your own home, it gets to the point where I excused myself one day … and I was the only one in the house.
That being said, I really do think there should be rules put in place where things like passing gas, belching, sneezing, coughing or projectile vomiting is acceptable, nay required, for manners to kick in while others can be exempt from such foolishness.
Let’s start with belching and farting, both of which involve passing gas, but just by different delivery systems.
So, when you do either, you deliver a variety of gasses into the air that are already present, but to various degrees. If the smell is offensive, it goes away eventually, and the sounds are just too funny to be considered something rude or crude. I see it as getting to the punchline of a joke without bothering with the setup.
However, nothing about manners is funny and when a funny sound and a funnier smell comes from you; you’re scorned and expected to excuse yourself.
Next we have sneezing and what do people say when you sneeze? They say “bless you” because, back in the day, people thought that when you sneezed, you opened up your soul for demonic possession.
That, of course, is ridiculous. We now know that you open up your soul to evil when you yodel backwards.
Let’s consider what a sneeze is on a molecular level: thousands of plagued-filled droplets of disgust shooting out of your nose and mouth at speeds over 200 mph. And we bless people for this chemical-warfare assault?
The same goes with coughing.
Sure, it’s not as quick and merciless as a sneeze, but what it lacks in stealth, it makes up for in quantity.
For example, while a single cough expels fewer droplets at slower speeds, one rarely has a single cough as it’s more of a cough campaign.
As with sneezing, the person coughing isn’t scorned for doing so, but as they’re coughing up diseased phlegm, they’re asked, “Are you okay?”
Oh, and what do we call a series of coughs? A coughing “spell” because, back in the day, they believed continuous coughing meant you were cursed by a witch or a warlock.
Again, archaic nonsense. Everyone knows that a curse from a witch or a warlock results in irritable bowel syndrome.
However, if they want to play that game, then belching and passing gas is nothing more than the ghosts of our meals coming back to haunt us.
So, as we move forward in this grand, yet severely flawed, experiment known as civilization, I’d like to encourage everyone to let my words change your outlook on what society believes is “rude” or “crude” or “inappropriate while my parents are visiting, Mark!,” but I think I’ll have to recant my statements as my wife reminded me about another Shakespeare quote, this one from “Much Ado About Nothing.”
“Foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul breath, and foul breath is noisome; therefore I will depart unkissed.”
Well, excuse me.
According to Hofmann is written by staff reporter Mark Hofmann of Rostraver Township. His books, “Good Mourning! A Guide to Biting the Big One … and Dying, Too” and “Stupid Brain,” are available on Amazon.com.