Oh you can count me as a Northern English friend, T- I'm there when I'm not here. Looking forward to seeing you!!! Are you going to do the 7th Ave Brooklyn parade starting at 6:30? Rachel is going to hand out candies on the stoop of the 5th St house (my ex's place, at Halloween Central) from about 5 p.m., then it's the parade, then I thought we could all have pizza??? --either at my place on 18th St or in a local pizza parlor. Call me! I'll send you my phone numbers via email.
Mancks

Quite so. I did say "verbally if not actually". I'm in the "not actually" camp myself too. Far too risky, one way and another.

All of this puts me in mind of the first time I heard the word fuck, and it was uttered by a young man in my (approximately) 8th grade class, named Louis. He was a skinny little guy with big ears, unremarkable except for this utterance. Another memory of James overlaps this one, and that is of our beloved English teacher Noel John (a short, sandy  Welshman with a wonderful sense of humor) finding that same word scrawled into the endpapers of a textbook. The book had Louis's name in it too. On finding it one day, and associating the two, Mr John lost his sense of humor, grew red in the face and blew up into the most towering rage I had ever seen besides those of Aggie Bell, who was well known for losing it. It was a memorable occasion. I'm surprised poor Noel didn't have a stroke, and as for Louis....Louis, I thought, was a sleazy boy, of questionable morals and no courage.
I have few memories of Louis after that. For the next forty years or so, (not that I ever thought of him) I concluded that Louis was a Bad Boy who scrawled dirty words into books and didn't have the guts to own up to it.
Then, I played around with Facebook,  and who should turn up among my old English schoolmates but Louis, now living in an oil producing country in the Middle East. We had a short but intense correspondence, during which we both remembered the incident above. He said he had been set up--by whom he did not say--and so my forty year prejudice dissolved. His father died when he was sixteen, I learned,  and he was obliged to leave school and earn money. A great family man, he married young and kept the same wife despite separations. And so the word fuck became overlaid for me with a whole new set of connotations, to do with betrayal and fidelity turned upside down.
Now I say fuck at the drop of a hat, living in New York and working in an atmosphere in which such things are risque but not beyond the pale. My old boss had a worse mouth than mine. While all around write "G-d" and f---, we blithely fuck away, verbally if not actually. I would not want to return to the time in my life when the word was an utter taboo, because any talk of sex was equally taboo, and that was an uninformed and terrifying way to live, full of misinterpretations and lies.

Thanks! As a proud graduate of the Linguistics program of Edinburgh University, 1974, I rest my case.
Mancks

I find myself constantly saying or thinking "tough titties" even though the phrase "tough noogies" (sp?) is more common here, particularly among thirteen year olds (of whom I am not one, thank goodness.)
Nice to be back among company that understands the gravity of such matters.
Mancks

T dear!
My greatest regret in abandoning  Chihuahua for Scrabulous is that I miss your witty, empathic and charming posts. Yes, I signed up for Facebook and immediately "Friends" started plying me with requests to play online scrabble with them, with the inevitable result that I am now addicted, even though I am thoroughly squashed about 50% of the time.
But I am well, contentedly alone if you don't count the companionship of the two whippets, three angelfish, one hermit crab etc etc. Beloved daughter is off at a posh camp in Maine for a month, where she rides horses and brushes llamas and swims, in that order, while I bravely keep the clamoring people of Brooklyn supplied with library services through the heat and storms of summer.
And how are you?
Manks

This woman is clearly mentally ill.
On the other hand--the lost love of my life once said: "a woman needs to have a waist."
Being somewhat lacking in that department--mine is more of a straight up and down look--good for 1920s flapper dresses I suppose--I add that to the long list of reasons why it didn't work out.
mancks