Recently I received a nice e-mail from a reader who suggested I should clean up my language. I see her point. Slaughter is not a pretty word. I should borrow a page from the politically correct humane societies and the next time I refer to slaughter cattle I should say that the cattle were �put to sleep.� See how much better that sounds? I'm sure the cattle that were put to sleep feel a lot better.

With all the political correctness running rampant in our society I think the writing in our world has greatly deteriorated. For example, in the wild, wild, west people weren't put to sleep or �laid to rest in a memorial park.� They bit the dust, went on their last roundup or circled the drain. They didn't have a negative patient care outcome or become a non-breather but instead were carried off in a meat wagon to the bone orchard or boothill. See how much more vivid their writing was?

When western writers like Dobie and Will James wrote that a horse came unhinged, broke in two or went on an unscheduled flight, they said the cowboy chewed gravel or kissed the ground. They didn't say that a horse received a negative feedback loop and had an intermittent explosive disorder. Cowboys with names like Kettle Belly, Leather Lip and Horse Face didn't go to bed in sleep systems, they just crawled into their flea trap. And they most certainly did not �create an imbalance in the ecology of their environment by experiencing a bout of gastric distress.�

The writing was better because the western writers painted every word with a different color. The cook was a dough wrangler, pot walloper and biscuit roller and he always had a pot of whistle berries (beans) on the fire. A saddle tramp was not residentially challenged... he just rode the grub line. I especially like the way the cowboys referred to their spurs as gut wrenches, pet makers and can openers. These days our guthooks would probably be called a distal equine management system.

If the cowboy of yesteryear fell in love he wasn't emotionally involved; he got cupid's cramps or calico fever. If the object of the cowpoke's attention suffered from female sexual arousal disorder because the cowboy had an appearance deficit, the intellectually unremarkable cowboy wouldn't mope. He'd just get drunker than a peach orchard sow by looking at the moon through the long neck of a bottle of joy juice and light up the town like a honky tonk on Saturday night. Now that is writing, my friends!

Alas, it has become clear that we can't use such colorful language any more. Only recently I read where wolves put a band of ewes to sleep and it was referred to as �a livestock depredation incident.� Some agrarian product specialists (farmers) are not in a drought but only in a water deficit situation. I bet that cheers them up.     

I'll have to get used to living in a world where manure is bio solids, illegals are guest workers and members of Congress have a decision making disorder. To get with the times I suppose I should refer to auctioneers as commodity relocation specialists and order buyers as product allocation representatives. They'll no doubt buy certified preowned cows instead of culls. Instead of saying that a calf was weaned in the future I'll be completely honest and say that the calf was a victim of custodial interference.