What the Eff?

So Justin Trudeau uses a certain Anglo-Saxon word that originally referred to agricultural activities and the entire Canadian media drops everything to ooh and aah. It was more than a little strange. And what it said about the national media is possibly more interesting that what it said about the leader of the third party. But what does it say about the leader of the third party?

After all, it wasn't the "profanity as art form" we expect from Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker. (VERY strong language warning on the link.) It was a workaday profanity used in a workaday manner by a man for whom workaday is less an adjective than a notional construct.

It was ultimately National Post journo Kelly McParland who explained what it was really all about. Justin Trudeau wants to position himself as the tribune of the middle class - which wouldn't be so hard if he had the first clue what constitutes the middle class, or what concerns the middle class, or anything at all about the middle class.

So instead of bothering t understand the middle class, one-percenter Trudeau and his one-percenter handlers have decided that the Dauphin should pretend to BE middle class by doing those things they dimly imagine the working class do.

Like swearing in public.

Mr. Trudeau has taken to cursing in public, apparently figuring that’s the way the middle class communicates.

Ultimately, Trudeau thinks middle class people are graceless, classless, foul-mouthed folk with limited vocabularies and no particular sense of propriety. Charming.

I was in the Navy for 25 years. I know how to swear. I can make a celebrity chef blush, and I could give Malcolm Tucker a run for his money. Indeed, I have used the same profanity Trudeau used - and I have used it as a verb, a noun, an adverb and an adjective ... in the same sentence.  I think I've even used it as a preposition once or twice.

But there are places where I have never used and would never use that word. Because there are places it's simply inappropriate.

And anyone with even the faintest clue of what a middle class sensibility looks like would know that.