What a silly bunt

That Jane Fonda, what’re you gonna do with her?

Here some of us were just recently able to get past the Hanoi-Jane thing, and suddenly there she is, on the Today Show, no less, uttering the ‘C-word’. Except, she didn’t use the C-word euphemism, but stated the exact profane four-letter reference to the female pudendum. Tsk.

Needless to say, poor Meredith Vieira -- after she’d ducked out to change her underpants following Jane’s expletive offering – was a trifle nonplused by the utterance.

I didn’t actually watch the Today episode. That was mainly because I don’t actually watch Today, period. I gave up on the program after they unceremoniously turfed adorable Jane Pauley (which gives you some idea of my vintage) and replaced her with that absolutely awful and excruciatingly irritating, Katie Couric.

Anyway, that’s by-the-by. I did glance at a YouTube account of the incident, and I must confess I was profoundly unshocked by it all. The reference was a sort of flippant comment by Jane, referring to the ubiquitous Vagina Monologues, and something about whether she wanted to take a part in some stage offering or other of the VM. Jane then referred to it as the “C---- Show.”

Oopsie-Daisy.

Anyway, Meredith apologized to the viewership, assuming that none had ever heard the word, and spoke for Jane, saying how mortified she was about it all. And then Jane herself also said she was quite mortified about it all, and so on. And then everybody had tea and hopefully forgot about an incident that didn’t quite have the impact of Janet Jackson’s boob ‘accident’ of a few years back.

But, it is a charged word, no doubt. It is a reference most women loathe, though some are relatively comfortable with it at certain times. Anyway, I suppose it’s kind of a nasty word, and it’s certainly a charged one. Though, I think of how it was neutralized in an old Monty Python sketch in which a man who could not pronounce the letter ‘c’, and therefore always substituted ‘b’. He was advised to substitute ‘k’ rather than ‘b’ when something arose calling for a hard-c sound. “I could do that, couldn’t I?” he mused aloud, and then admonished himself by saying: “What a silly bunt.”

Done that way, it was very amusing.

Personally, I think it’s good that the ‘c-word’ still has the power to inflame the sensibilities of some.

After all, we’ve by-and-large defused entirely the ‘F-word’, so we should have something to shock folks with, maybe.

I actually do believe that society has become far too profane and tasteless, so it’s good that we still have a word we deem to be vulgar.

I suspect Jane thought so, too. Especially after she’d had her mouth scrubbed out with Lifebuoy after the show.