...and a lot of people apparently DO let the words hurt them.
August 17, 2011
It’s no secret that the words and language we use color our perceptions of the world. Having grown up in Mexico, my thoughts often start out in Spanish even though I speak more English than anything. That syntax and sound are the things I use to measure beauty in speech. I think, though, that there is no better recent example of this ability for early language to shape our perceptions than this little article.
In short, Johanna Gohmann talks about how her parents used euphemisms for certain words, especially things pertaining to sex or bodily secretions. From her article:
Perhaps not surprisingly, my parents’ modesty spilled over into s-e-x terminology as well. To be fair, we didn’t exactly live in Berkeley, Calif., with 9-year-olds openly shouting, “Mommy, my vagina itches!” This was the ’70s and ’80s in the suburbs of Indiana. Many families employed a certain slang with these words, and not just because “rectum” is a difficult word for a toddler. For many, it’s a given that girls have their “coochie” and boys have their “weiner.” But not us, thank you very much. A brief dictionary sampling displays words that were all our own.
Boo(verb) – to defecate: “Mom! The baby just booed in his pants.”
Tink(verb) – to urinate: “He just tinked into a root beer can while driving!”
Tote(noun) – both the male and female genitalia: “Jo kicked Marty in the tote!”
Bo(noun) – buttocks: “Where’s the Benadryl? A bee stung Graham on the bo.”
Giving him elbows(verb) – breast-feeding: “Mom is busy. She’s giving the baby elbows.”
Did you catch all that? It reminds me of a child a coworker once taught. He didn’t know any words for animals or numbers. He knew the baby words. Instead of dog, he’d call said animal a “bowwow.” A seven? That was a “stick w’nother stick.”
My niece, being all of six years old, is actually a very eloquent young lady who can speak a few English phrases and has near-perfect Spanish diction. Why? Her parents never baby-talked to her. I’m assuming my boss and her husband did the same thing with their daughter, a precocious little thing that has syntax down.
I hope you’re seeing the problem with raising a child knowing euphemisms for common, everyday things the rest of us freely discuss. I understand a person might be uncomfortable with certain images and topics, but to alter the word itself will not get rid of that image or that topic.
Check this out. I’m going to substitute the word “Funyun” for “spic,” and all death-related verbs will be switched with “splooge.”
Okay, you see those Funyuns over there? They come here, they steal our jobs, and leave us with nothing. I’m not saying we need to splooge them. No one is saying anyone needs to get splooged. I’m just saying that something needs to get done about the Funyun problem or some of the more radical elements in this country might splooge them if they feel they’ve been pushed too far. And it’s not that I’m racist. My best friend is a Funyun. I just don’t want to see splooge on the streets of this great country.
Back in the third article ever posted here, I said that words have power when we give them power. Unless you have synesthesia, changing one word to another will not take away the meaning of a word. It might make it silly, but it doesn’t mean your subject’s changed.
Don’t be afraid of using the correct words and terms for something. Granted, there is such a thing as being polite in casual conversation, and certain words are funnier than others, but don’t sugar-coat the conversation because the topic upsets you. If the topic is what bothers you, don’t even talk about it. Be honest with yourself. Words have meaning for a reason.
Stop blaming the phonetics and start confronting the vocabulary.
And now, I present to you the only good thing to come out of Final Destination 5. You have to admire the self-awareness these actors and actresses had towards the entire project. They’re comfortable making fun of their movie even before it comes out. Enjoy the campiness!
Yeah. See, time’s going to get really tight in the next few weeks, and I have to be a lot more conscious of the time I have to write. I’m going to start teaching a middle school writing course over the next few weeks, so there goes a lot of my time. Combined with moving and a lot of other things, and I get maybe an hour a day to do these posts, so these Divine by Zero articles will be the place to go for the weird and the things I just don’t have the time to write about in the regular articles.
Let’s get started with today’s batch.
What would happen if the Beatles got signed today? The results are… terrifying.
Chihuahuas are the tiny snacks of the animal kingdom. They’re uppity and serve no purposes… until I saw this little guy working as a sheep dog. A chihuahua sheep dog. let that sink in for a moment.
And yes, I know that was a meme within a meme about memes. Let’s pay homage to the original guy, shall we?
If you watch science fiction or horror in any way shape or form, you’ve probably seen Brian Thompson. You may not know his name, but you’ve seen him. He’s one of those guys you just know from his voice, and aside from starring in a lot of cheesy movies (Mortal Kombat sequel, anyone?) he has a lot more going for him. Check out the last paragraph in this bio.
So… Justin Beiber goes out in public, knowing full well his fans are crazy obsessed, and some old guy tackled him. Okay, you might say, just arrest the guy. Beiber wasn’t hurt. But his fans were. Oh dear God, the fans. Apparently, the death threats against Kim Kardashian and Selema Gomez were not enough. THESE death threats make Bond villains look subtle.
If anybody out there reads Japanese, could they please tell me the context of this nifty little English phrase in this book? I have a feeling that knowing the answer may be worse than not knowing, but I’m willing to give it a shot.
On the other hand, Pat Robertson was not amused. he goes on an warn us about raping angels and that no civilization that has accepted homosexuality has survived. Well, NO civilization has survived intact.
And finally, this is for the gaming geeks out there. I always had a problem with the whole concept of “the chainmail bikini,” not only because it objectified women and made it hard to invite girls to games, but because in a world of dragons and magic, I actually found THAT to be the least believable thing in the world. That being said, how would you average adventuring female react to actually having to wear this? And who thought it would be a good idea?
A lot of things will hopefully go down in the next couple of weeks, one of which I hope will involve me getting a full-time teaching position. If that’s the case, Randomology.org may suffer because of lack of time, so starting next week, I’m going to try something a little different. I’ll run shorter articles, maybe 300-400 words, six days a week and include 4-5 links to stories at the bottom. Not only will this make writing the website a lot faster, but I’ll get stories out that would otherwise get left behind.
Trust me, I have a lot of links and images I never get to put on here.
For this week at least, regular schedule will continue. I’ll see how this goes over tomorrow.
Fasten your seatbelts. It’s link time.
Megan Fox will be in the new issue of Interview magazine and she will be in a little bob cut. And she will be making out with herself. Sort of. It’s a mannequin designed to look like her. Still, if you’ll settle for that, check out the link.
That trailer a few DvB’s ago for a Mortal Kombat movie is looking more and more like a real teaser for a movie. The trailer for the new Mortal Kombat game finally came out and it looks nothing like the Saw-like gore-fest in the live-action clip. Here’s hoping the movie is as awesome as the new game also looks.
Anyone who saw Minority Report remembers those awesome computer interfaces that reacted to touch and movement. Check out how they were designed and why you can expect to have your very own hyper-futuristic computer in just a few short years.
Growing up in Mexico, I remember seeing a lot of playground that were rusted, or neglected, or otherwise unsafe. I didn’t care! They were fun! Danger equals fun! THESE playgrounds, however, would give most kids nightmares for a year.
Maxim generally runs quotes from the interviews with their models and try to appeal in the manly man in all of us with titillating snippets. Problem is… sometimes they objectify the women much more than they probably intend. However, some clever folks at Reddit have changed this and, well, “fixed” a photo to make it more appealing to THINKING men. Take that, chauvinism!
Ozzy Osbourne has done a lot in his life, from fronting one of the greatest rock bands of all time to showing us a family far more dysfunctional than our own. However, now Ozzy’s blood may help science learn how the body reacts to substance abuse.
Raise your hand if you get frustrated. Now keep the middle finger up if you curse on a daily basis. Lewis Black once famously said that if you step into a particularly cold morning and you don’t at least curse in your mind, you have anger issues.
He may have a point.
Certain words have the power to make people gasp, cringe, or otherwise run to the nearest censor for validation that the ears and souls of children have been tainted by words! Who will think of the children!? They just heard and/or read something that will stunt their growth, lead them away from Baby Jesus, and make them smoke. At least, that’s the reaction I see every time someone slips on live television and says something “naughty.”
We’re all familiar with cursing, mostly because we have so many safeguards for it and are constantly reminded of what steps someone else has taken to ensure we never have to deal with it. We have the FCC in the United States, parental controls on televisions, internet filters, positions within companies and government bodies designed to keep language in check, both in the office and when dealing with others, and any number of language speed bumps both imposed by others and personal. We have a cultural aversion to certain words. We’ve given them power. This in itself isn’t revolutionary, so I’m not expecting a Pulitzer for this article. What does intrigue me is the idea that the words themselves, not necessarily the meaning, make people uncomfortable. Even more amazing is that swearing is less taboo than, say, gratuitous violence or gore. Why? Why do these words have so much power? Is-
Wait… Before we go any further, why do we call the use of profane language “cursing”? Or even “swearing”? Dictionary.com wasn’t any help, simply listing the various definitions and origins of the words, but not going into detail on why we are said to curse and swear when using profanity. A curse is something that is bad luck, something designed to hurt something or someone. A curse is something terrible. It’s an ill-omen, the full moon, blood dripping from the walls and little kids appearing in the hallway, and I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that none of these things is good. What about swearing? Swearing is supposed to be, according to Dictionary.com, the act of making a powerful declaration, typically upon something holy or divine. The examples it gives are the Bible and a deity. I won’t deny certain swear words can indeed be powerful and denote a great deal of emotion, but I don’t think this was the original intent. These two euphemisms for using foul language just make things more confusing. They mean opposites!
Anyway, back to the main topic: the power of profanity. All of us watch television. It’s unavoidable. Certain shows and channels don’t use expletives, so they either beep them out, which is distracting, or they re-dub the line with another word or phrase, usually to unintentional comic effect. We hear “heck” for “hell” and “crap” instead of “shit.” Here’s where things get interesting though, because no matter what euphemism we use, we’re still relaying the same meaning. If I stub my toe and yell “Aw, excrement,” I’ve conveyed the same meaning as actually using language the FCC would ban. If I were a television station, I would have gotten fined…
Thank you, internet.
Why do we allow the “tame” version but not the full expletive? It can’t be the meaning. Both phrases mean the same thing, and it’s the same intent!
Is it the WORD itself? The spelling, the specific arrangement of letters? Do we see them, not as a series of symbols, but rather an alchemical formula for something so devious that merely looking at or hearing these words will cause untold damage? Will it curse us? Will God strike us down? Shall it open the Forbidden Gates and unleash a torrent of Lovecraftian abominations to besiege our sanity?
Something is at work here. All these profane words can’t simply have power in on themselves, can they? Just because we say one word for another, does it make it better?
Apparently, television standards say it does. When the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica went on the air in 2004, the writers decided to keep the made-up swear word “frak” (spelled “frack” in the 1970’s version) so they could have their characters curse and swear without having to use bleeps or cut the audio. “Frak” has the same meaning and connotations as its equivalent four-letter F-word and characters use in the same colorful ways.
This sounds strange since BSG premiered and aired on SyFy, a channel over which the FCC has no jurisdiction to censor language. However, all television shows in the United States receive a rating and BSG already had a TV-14 rating due to violence and mature themes. I guess when the good guys resort to torture and suicide bombings, you have to make a few concessions. It makes sense to want to make it as easy as possible to syndicate the show on networks that aren’t under the same level of freedom, so “frak” was born.
Orson Scott Card wrote that if a writer wants to use made-up foul language, it had better be for a good reason, but it was simply easier to use real profanity. It really does have the capacity to sound downright stupid. And yet, sometimes, it works. Farscape got away with a plethora of alien cursing that does sound like word soup, and yet the viewer gets so involved in the action that the meaning of the words comes through, not whatever strange alien phrase just popped out of someone’s mouth.
Just like “frak,” Farscape’s cursing worked. Some of these made-up oaths have even bled over into popular culture.
The unfortunate thing is that we’re back to where we started. It’s not the intent and meaning itself that society objects. It can’t be. The euphemisms mean the same thing as the original word, and we’ve shown we can substitute new words that make no sense but still have the exact same meaning, even similar phonemes. Process of elimination says that the words themselves are the problem, but why are we so afraid of so much language? Is it the association these phrases and terms have attained as being used by the uneducated, the callous, or the amoral? It must be. We don’t want our youth exposed to such filthy words!
Wait, don’t we see blood splatter, open bodies, and murder on CSI, Law and Order, every cop show in the last fifteen years, and, oh yes… FX aired a slightly edited version of Starship Troopers a month after 9/11. The only thing they cut out was the profanity and left in every Bug-induced murder. How do I know? I watched it. Every week, millions of us watch dismemberments, dead bodies, and all manner of gooey fun on basic cable, and it’s the kind of thing that you’d see in a Saw movie. Don’t get me wrong. I love these shows. I just wonder who thought saying “shit” was wrong but THIS was fine:
We seem to have more disdain for specific words, specific sounds, than we do for violence. When the recent red band trailer for the movie Kick Ass came out, a lot of people were outraged over an 11-year-old girl using the c-word and cursing like a sailor, and yet fewer were bothered by, oh… same girl cutting off a man’s leg, shooting someone in the head, and making John Preston look downright arthritic. It’s a perfect example of the kinds of weird standards we seem to have infused into every corner of society. Violence, gore, and dismemberment? Fun! Someone swears? Shock and gasp and a hefty fine!
It’s dumb. What do these words do? They describe. That’s all they do. They do have societal consequences, sure, but that’s because we all “know” they’re bad words. I tell my students that “Why?” is the most important question they can ask in college. If you understand the cause of something, you know more about it. You can come at an argument from a different angle. You have power. Even in Harry Potter, they knew that not saying Voldemort’s name made him more powerful. The only reason we don’t use this language is because we’ve stigmatized it. Why? Because it’s bad. Why? Because we’re not supposed to use it. Why? Because it’s stigmatized. Why?
Do you see the pattern?
Language is a tool. That’s it. It expresses ideas and it is, admittedly, imperfect. Until we develop telepathy, it’ll have to do. We’re uncomfortable with these terms because our society has certain taboos against sex, defecation, and other topics, so the words used to describe them are obviously going to have their own taboo, yet euphemisms for these terms don’t bother us. Only highly specific terms will get you in trouble.
