Gay-bashing KY legislator tried to outlaw erections

Page One Kentucky, of course, has the low-down.

Not only is Gary "Tapp Tapp" Tapp obsessed with legislating homophobia, he had the audacity to help create legislation - seriously, with House Bill 59 during the 2000 Regular Session - making it a misdemeanor to be seen in public in a "discernible turgid state."

SNIP

Really, he wanted to classify having a boner as nudity and wanted to make it illegal.

I'll leave it to Page One's commenters to speculate on what subconscious perversity drives Tapp's obsession with other people's penises.

I want to know what kind of twisted vocabulary would make a person choose "turgid" to describe the state of an erect penis.

From Webster's online dictionary:

1. Ostentatiously lofty in style; "a man given to large talk"; "tumid political prose".

2. Abnormally distended especially by fluids or gas; "hungry children with bloated stomachs"; "he had a grossly distended stomach"; "eyes with puffed (or puffy) lids"; "swollen hands"; "tumescent tissue"; "puffy tumid flesh".

Synonyms: bloated (adj), bombastic (adj), declamatory (adj), distended (adj), large (adj), orotund (adj), puffed (adj), puffy (adj), swollen (adj), tumescent (adj), tumid (adj).

(Emphasis added.)

In five decades of voracious reading, the noun I have seen most often modified by "turgid" is "prose," and it never meant the writing was hard, swollen, excited or tumescent.

I've successfully avoided reading romance novels, though; maybe "turgid" is a popular adjective among the ripped-bodice crowd.

You gotta stop reading those romance novels, Gary.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....