All mouth and no trousers: linguistic embarrassments

This piece broods about generational differences as registered in the ease, or not, with which altered ways of public talk about private sexual behaviour get handled, and especially given the British journalistic mixture of prurience with babyishness. It suggests that to feel embarrassed isn't simply to be understood as a reprehensible mark of aging, but is a distinctively linguistic emotion which rises when you find yourself ruthlessly shepherded in the direction of saying what you don't want to say. So there is sound sense in attending to your own embarrassment, rather than being silently embarrassed by it as if it simply demarcated age from youth.