Spitting in Public Is Really Not Okay

What makes people think spitting in public is okay? From Chinatown to Midtown, from Bushwick to Bayside, Gothamites openly expel their esophageal waters with impunity. It's gross. And, unlike other now hopelessly ingrained NYC rudeness's -- not letting people off the subway before getting on or halting the flow pedestrian traffic to selfishly inventory an iPhone -- spitting in public is illegal. Yet why is it the one quality of life offense that is never enforced? Why unlike other public disposals of bodily fluids -- defecation, urination -- has expectoration been granted social acceptance?

Is spitting somehow cool? I know kids imitate baseballs players who dribble saliva in a perpetual, effortless, un-self-conscious style. Then there's the finesse spitter, who can spritz an emission between his teeth while cutely tweeting a spray bottle noise. And who can not admire the manly deep throated reach-back hawking that presages itself with an audible warning that sounds like the searching between radio stations static, progresses with a circling up of the lips as if about to blow a smoke ring and ends with an explosive firing out of a saliva-mucous bullet, sometimes aimed indiscriminately and other times with marksmen-like precision. In all three instances I am repulsed.

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