Carnival Mania II!!!

Interestingly, my earlier installment of Carnival Mania has recently gotten a huge spike in search query hits. It's almost as though there's something else out there called "Carnival Mania" and Google is foolishly redirecting people to me! Oh, well. If you're looking for some sort of Carnival Mania other than my personal list of cool carnivals, then you've come to the wrong place...

First up The Humanist Symposium!!! This is a fun one, and I particularly liked John Remy's contribution A Personal History of Profanity. He talks about the typical Mormon belief that "A speaker who mouths profanity or vulgarity to punctuate or emphasize speech confesses inadequacy in his or her own language skills." I was taught that one, too, and refuted it way back here:

I live by all sorts of controversial theories of language. For one thing, I disagree with the theory that the use of profanity indicates that the speaker necessarily has a small vocabulary. The latent mathematician in me can't keep from pointing out that actively avoiding profanity technically makes your vocabulary smaller, not bigger. Sure it's easy to over-use naughty words, but if you know how to use them well, you can achieve certain effects that you can't create without them.

In other carnivals, there have bee two fab installments of the Carnival of the Godless since I last linked those guys here and here, and don't forget the not-at-all-concisely-named Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy #10!!!

Then there's a cool new carnival coming up for skeptical parents: Skeptical Parent Crossing!!! This one hasn't even had its first installment yet, but if you want to be in on it, submit your articles here.