It’s Gratuitous Expletive Season, Fornicators: Sheldon Cooper’s Barely Condescending, Refreshingly Wholesome Redemption of Decorative Gourds

by Lisa Rosenberg

I don’t know about you people, but if I had a nickel for every time the F-bomb drops in those perennial tirades about defenseless decorative gourds, I’d have more than enough elemental nickel to build a Ni-Cad pack for some glowing, odorless, artificial squash. Then I’d string them up in a dynamic display of AI-generated fractal choreography, and it would be just one more glorious example of scientific prowess going entirely under-appreciated by society at large.

Anyone familiar with the popular autumnal articles in question knows too well how they assault the unsuspecting reader. One minute, I’m snort-chuckling my way through a light-hearted riff on punctuation, then click and WHAMMO! I’ve landed in a twisted alternative gourd-verse: patella-deep in intrusive imagery implicating my mother, grammatically unhinged references to coitus, gruesome olfactory metaphors, and passive-aggressive shellack. Worst of all, I’m finding it truly funny. That’s about as demoralizing as having a crush on someone with no math skills whatsoever. Correction: not even close, but still demoralizing.

By this point, readers accustomed to gratuitous copulatory and excretory expletives have probably moved on, much like sexually-transmitted pathogens. For the rest of us, there’s an infinite array of gourd-based possibilities beyond mere adolescent hijacking of arguably the most damned protagonist in all of Greek tragedy. That would be Oedipus, in case you skipped high school. And his mother-copulating excrement would be as fictional as he is, although the situational excrement does get exceedingly real.

I, for one, can envision a gourd-like curvature to spacetime, non-Euclidian gourds, gourd-based multiplayer gaming, and hostile aliens whose wrath is mollified by a savory squash casserole and hot beverage. Next, I might design a carved-gourd replica of the Enterprise C or D, but after estimating the quantity of gourd dust involved, I’ll task a minimally literate engineer or grad student with constructing it. Stay with me, people. And anyone pumped for gourd charades after dinner DM me, but only if you know your gourds from your eggplants, and use the correct emoji in idiomatic English, Latin, or Klingon.

Just so we’re clear, I’m not opposed to vegetable-themed rants on the whole, especially those indirectly supportive of string theory or involving homespun handcrafts. Yet I tire of superfluous insertions of randy profanities directed largely at the reader, or impersonating actual adjectives. Nothing like good, clean, squash-positive fun to banish the lexical H-E-double-hockey-sticks that dominates modern entertainment.

But fall is nearly over, people. Solstice is right around the copulating corner. That gives us almost a full copulating year for recovery (and excrement) before the next copulating round of potty-mouthed gourd-slinging hoopla (and excrement) begins on our digital doorsteps. In the meantime, fornicators et al, I’m not above pun-based obscenities that rely on a modicum of higher education. So, if you didn’t know the French word for “seal,” well, here you go.

Farewell to fall, phoque-heads!

Bazinga.