Nobody asked but-cept …
“But-cept” is a portmanteau word created (as far as I know) by my first four grandsons in their private conversations. I intuit that it is a more powerful way of signalling a perceived contradiction.
I was thinking today of a people who went to revolutionary war over a couple of pennies on the dollar in taxes. The colonists of America grew sick and tired, purportedly, of being led around by the nosering by a demented king in London, England. Then the big “but-cept” irony punched me in the side of the head.
It must be a fiction that the colonial man in the streets had any cohesive thought on the matter. The American Revolutionary War was promulgated by the landed gentry to protect their already-claimed advantages. They got the peasantry to fight and die, to freeze to death, to starve for the pretty abstraction of freedom. This war, like all others, was fought for the status quo. But-cept, how do I know?
I know because today’s peasantry, the persons-in-the-streets, cannot be motivated to do something logical, to rise up against the taxation theft that steals a third — going on a whole — of their output. They cannot get their but-cepts in gear to rise up against the self-serving ruling oligarchy. They (we) are too busy chasing fictional butterflies at the border wall.
— Kilgore Forelle
