Rural; I just had to share…

OK, I’m straight-up stealing this from the #1 spot off of Dan O’Brien’s list of 5 Innocent Words That Need to Be Banned from English: Part 2

For anyone who doesn’t have my job or my employer this won’t be funny unless you work for an insurance company that has an underwriting aversion to country folk who like to live like hermits. We’ll take your business if you’re only partially anti-social, but if you are whole-hog Una-bomber in a shack in the woods, you can take a hike Jack.

We screen for 'creepy.'

Needless to say the word “Rural” get’s tossed around a lot… and I mean A LOT because we look at it for auto eligibility regarding usage as we’ve only recently said we’ll let some autos used for rural mail delivery (if not modified) be acceptable, eligibility guidelines for wild-fire exposures for homes or whether or not we’ll let your damn kids have an unfenced pool or trampoline.

“The Schneider family has an unfenced pool; it’s secreted behind a hedge of arbor vitae to the North, the cow barn to the South and it’s only the old Johnson farmstead to the East, but they have 4 neighbors within 5 miles and ‘they’re good people,’ so I guess they’re rural enough that we’ll take their home…”

I hate having to say the word, I hear myself and my co-workers stumble over it, it’s obnoxious.

Without further adieu here is O’Brien’s take on the word RURAL:

There’s something about saying this word out loud that makes the speaker sound embarrassed. It’s just the way your mouth has to work in order to say it, it’s part-word and part-frog-impression. Your tongue has very little to do until the end, because most of the pronunciation of this word is handled by your lips, inner cheeks and…I guess, like, neck fat? Like you have to slightly tuck your chin in and vibrate and wobble your neck fat to properly say the word “rural.” And the dual R’s are just generally hard to handle, so everyone sounds unsure when they say it. It’s a confidence dampener.

What it is:

Unlike most of the words on this list, this isn’t a case where the definition is just as uncomfortable as phonetic design of the word; rural is completely tame. If something is rural, it just means that it’s more country than city. Clean air, open fields, serenity, cows. That stuff.

Use it in an Awful Sentence:

“Can you please rub some ointment on the rural area of my body? I refer to my genitals as the rural area, because they’re wild and overgrown, and full of bugs and stuff. And I would like you to rub ointment on it, with your hands.”

What it Actually Calls to Mind:

If there was an animal that, when faced with danger, roared and then immediately shit itself and then trailed off and cut its own roar short out of embarrassment, “rural” would be the onomatopoetic way we’d represent the sound. Dogs woof, cats meow, and poop-badgers rural.