Paltry Ribaldry

So Optimus Prime over there has a tendency to tell fat jokes on himself which fits this topic perfectly. He says, "I said I wanted an Atlas body, but this is ridiculous." He followed this up with, "Is that why they call it a hemisphere?" To which he added, "I know that's an orbit around me, but what's with the crack in the moon?" This whole discussion began when he complained that the last two days were hard on him because the sky was falling and there wasn't enough intelligent conversation around here with me in training. Ahh.... He said there just wasn't enough of him to go around and that was saying something. Groan....

So what the heck is paltry ribaldry? Well, the Queen was reading Jane Eyre, and one of the characters commented on the paltry ribaldry of the common folk, and neither one of us had any idea what this meant. I knew paltry, but ribaldry was completely new to me. I'm telling you, some of the language in that book is just not commonplace.

Anyway, we looked up the words (which took a bit of doing on two dictionary websites), to get a feel for what the author was trying to say in this expression. What it amounted to was worthless off-color humor, or perhaps petty lewdness or even the hollow sexual pursuits of the lower classes.

I related this in my head to a conversation I'd overheard when I was in the military. I was walking to my barracks and heard two grunts behind me talking about what they were going to do with their upcoming weekend. This was really the only part of the conversation I heard, but it summed up for me what this person in the book was likely talking about when he referred to paltry ribaldry. Grunt 1 asked grunt 2, "so what are you going to do this weekend?" Grunt 2 replied with complete honesty and seriousness, "Oh, I don't know. Get drunk and get laid."

Hm, thought I. Easy as that. At the time I'd heard this conversation, I'd not so much as had a date, so the idea that finding such things out there in the world somewhere was a concept somewhat foreign to me. I had an idea that this sort of thing went on, and the moral ineptitude of it still resonated despite my naivety. But that was the life of a young grunt. Blow crap up. Get drunk. Get laid. Lather, rinse, repeat. Paltry ribaldry.

So to end it, there was this air traffic controller on the ground who called up to one of the two planes circling the runway, and said, "Make right turn two-niner-zero for noise abatement." The pilot called back down and said, "Noise abatement? What are you talking about? It's five o'clock in the afternoon." The controller called back up and said, "Have you ever heard the sound of two planes crashing together?"

So the next time you hear someone discussing their lecherous weekend or someone tells a joke that perhaps isn't entirely safe for work, you can say (at least in the back of your head) "All this paltry ribaldry is simply intolerable."