How Inappropriate!

Whenever I hear the word inappropriate, I often let myself get bent out of shape with annoyance.

If something is inappropriate, it's a truly awful thing that shouldn't be said or done. A good example is child molestation. Another is a marriage that's loveless and full of unfaithfulness.

But more often, people call something inappropriate if it's minor and probably just embarrassing. Two examples are getting a speeding ticket or farting in church.

It's used to keep people in line and another example of crippling middle-class respectability. And if you consider those things to be heinous and unmentionable, you can imagine the efforts to ignore and forget and repress the awful things and the resistance to dealing with them.

When I think of the whole appropriate/inappropriate thing, I'm like Winston Smith in 1984 when he said, "I hate purity and I hate goodness."