It’s nasty. It’s crude. It’s rude. One pinch of Obscenium (Ob) and all of humanity could be wiped out, bringing decency to its knees, and leaving a putrid wasteland of scorched cruelty.

Obscenium does not occur naturally. The unpleasant element was created in a top-secret lab as an effort to build an “obscenity bomb”. The experiment went horribly wrong when a worker forgot to close off a rudeness filter, and trace amounts of obscenium leaked into the atmosphere.

Within hours, millions of decent human beings were assaulting each other with bird-flips, stink-eyes, racial slurs and throat-punches. Whole towns had mutated into marauding swarms of thuggish bullies who insulted each other to death.

“We never intended to use the obscenity bomb,” explained obsceniologist Buck Flembot, “A full-blown obscenity war would be so horribly obscene, we figured it would serve as a deterrent."

But Obscenium is now showing up in coffee, pretzels, beer, movies, religion, shampoo, mustard, gummy worms, nail polish and just about everything else we can snort and swallow.

Efforts to contain the crueldemic proved fruitless. "We strongly encourage face masks, goggles and butt plugs to stop the obscenity," said Nasty Professor Calvin Whimple. But infected hordes laughed it off as “a crusade of kindness by sensitivity Nazis”.

And so, politeness and respect hover on the brink of extinction.

But Obscenium isn’t the only new element to grace the periodic table. Others include: Dumbfuckium, Complainium, Obnoxium and Unobtainium.

"We believe that Unobtainium (Un) might be the ultimate cure to the obscenity outbreak”, said Prof. Whimple, "but so far, it’s unobtainable."