Luck Fuck Duck Suck

My colleague, let's call him A, suffers from Tourette Syndrome and I can't tell you how intrigued I am by his affliction. TS is the practical joker and ventriloquist among diseases. It throws rubber snakes at the victim's synapses, yanks facial muscles from one end of the skull to the other, seeming clogs the throat with gunk and puts foul words into the mouth.
All of this happens with A.

11 am meeting at work: Ed: Seems like a nice story. Let's follow it up... A: Nice story, nice story, fuck you, COUGH. BELLOW.

Over the phone: Yes, yes, I'll be landing tomorrow in Delhi, thanks for arranging the (ejects abuse in Hindi)...

At his desk: Every 10 minutes I can see his eyes hit the roof of his head, his face compress and then expand and I also hear him whistle. The last is an attempt by A to calm himself down.

When I first heard about TS, I looked it up on the net. TS was described as an inherited neurological disorder characterised by tics -- involuntary, rapid, sudden movements or vocalisations that occur repeatedly in the same way. A TS sufferer describes the affliction as "something like an itch, you have to cough, clear your throat, abuse, you really have to."

Upon more reading up on the subject, I came across even more fascinating stuff. A's tendency to spit abuses at the most inopportune of moments is known as coprolalia. It's actually a trio of lalias, but thankfully, just around 20 percent of TS victims are troubled by the Lalia brothers; echolalia (repeating the words of others); and palilalia (repeating one's own words).
Certain words also get fished out by A from a random conversation, enter his brain's seedy alleys and come out sounding pretty colourful. So if someone around him says "luck", chances are that A can't resist saying "fuck".

For those of us who know him, A's great company, especially when we have visitors. The red faces, those startled expressions and the double-takes courtesy the different ways in which A commits social harakiri often has all of us in splits.

Goes without saying that, more often than not, life's a bitch for A, but he's handling it well--the man travels all over the country, writes decent features and every morning, paints the greys walls of our workplace a fiery, riotous yellow.