Strangers on a train

Yesterday afternoon while taking the train from work, I was standing next to a teenaged girl who was talking on her cell phone. Nothing too unusual there. She was rather loud, so I heard everything she said. Nothing unusual there either. She let fly with quite the string of obscenities. That, too, isn’t unusual. Then she said, “I can’t talk about that right now. There are people around.”

It was nice to see that she had some sense of propriety, especially in this age when society is expected to salute at parades celebrating sexual depravity. At the same time, though, I couldn’t help but wonder just what sort of thing was of a nature that a youngster with so little shame couldn’t mention in a public place.