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Al Geist wrote:
> If you find the terms tacky because of sexual
> innuendo, then that is a personal problem; however, if you find those terms
> tacky because they do not accurately describe what the reader is supposed to
> do or see, then that is something altogether different.
When I was just a lad, learning fly fishing at my Daddy's knee, I
remember being amazed at his immodest instruction to assemble the
tapered lengths of fly rod by inserting the male ferule into the female
ferule. What I still don't know is this: Was my modest reaction to his
uninhibited instruction a hand-me-down virtue from the generations that
went before him, or was it an innate sensibility that afflicts everyone
(with notable exceptions), regardless of indoctrination?
Whatever, I reckon that some people are bound to squirm at instructions
as innocently contrived as "Insert Tab A into Tab B." How odd that this
motif keeps surfacing in how-to instructions, that it causes ambivalence
in chaste readers yet continues to be used by writers, and that anyone
with the slightest mechanical aptitude can do it without instructions! I
think it must simply be inevitable--to eliminate it would be to deny the
thing that sustains us.
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