I was sitting on my front porch one day last fall when a teenager flew by on his bicycle and as if on cue, let loose with a dramatic “hawwwwkkkk phllllooootttt!!!!”, a sound that is becoming more familiar with each passing day. This call of the wild cyclist was followed by a punctuated “schppllaatt!!!!”, itself almost a signature of the age we live in, as the former contents of the young man’s mouth met up with the sidewalk below him.
I was struck by a couple of things (thankfully, not by those contents) about this now-common, everyday occurrence. First, I shuddered to think I had recently strolled along that same sidewalk in my bare feet and now may never do so again. And I was impressed at how the boy who so pointedly parted with his little wad of phlegm seemed totally relaxed with this public displaying of his bodily fluids. I am sure, had I accosted him about his behaviour, that he would have been completely unaware that anyone could possibly object to what he’d done so nonchalantly.
And why would he know anything might be out of place? Spitting is all the rage and not a word about it from anyone, not even the many cranky old geezers in print who should have been onto this by now. We are surrounded by people who seem to be suffering from a very serious oversupply of saliva and nothing is being done about it.
Where are studies to find out why the mouths of our young people are filling up with secreted liquid so many times during the day that their only hope is to relieve themselves of this throaty burden wherever and whenever they must?
The walk from the parking lot to the public building where I once spent my working days reminded me of the jaunts I used to take as a boy across the pasture fields on our farm, journeys that required me to take care that each step landed on nice green grass that had yet to be eaten, and not in the brown stuff that resulted from the foliage that already had been digested.
A friend asked me a while back why I always walk with my head down and I couldn’t answer him but now I know that the reason is that for years I was forever on the lookout for the recently deposited products of the overactive mouth and throat glands of the hundreds of young people who used the same thoroughfare that I followed to work daily. And my rather morbid search (I’ll admit it) for these random “spitfalls” did not end at the front door of the building as they could be found in copious quantities on the hall floors and the steps inside.
This always led me to wonder at the mental process that suggested to a person that a good idea would be to lay a slippery patch on the steps that weary workers used to climb to and from their offices all day long.
A friend and I were one day chatting in a cafeteria in a public building when a big, young guy strolled by and let fly with a bundle of the material under discussion into an open garbage can, in full view of dozens of people who were eating their lunch. In this case, it occurred to me that the action might have had more to do with the man’s need to be seen than it did with his need to expectorate which I think is a key to understanding the activity. In a word, spitting is cool possibly because it is something you wouldn’t see uncool people doing.
More than half a century after the last disgusting spittoon was removed from the last public place that had one, the hock and the splat are back. Lined up at a bus stop a while back were half a dozen teens and from them, in the space of a quarter hour, dozens of little packages were brought to the lips and shot to the ground. Obviously some sort of social-bonding ceremony of the New Millennium.
But, you will say, and I would have too, that this must just be one more example of how uncouth and uncivilized today’s young males have become. I say I would have agreed with you had I not, on two separate occasions, followed young women along on the sidewalk to work and stepped around the little gifts they left me in my path.
A while back, as a middle-aged man stood in a large downtown Toronto mall watching the world go by, his balding scalp was struck by a very wet spitball from the second-floor mezzanine. Purposely done? Probably not. Someone just had to spew. If the odd bare head got in the way, hey, what’s the biggie?
Isn’t that what hats are for?
Now in case you think Saint James’s halo is hugging his head a little too tightly, I need to confess that I too have taken part in the above objectionable behaviour. But in my defence, I was never showing off. Most often I did it right after a disgusting bug flew into my open gob.
(This week, Saskatoon city council considered a bylaw banning spitting in public places. As well, council is also looking at banning public urination and littering.)
©2004 Jim Hagarty
