Nick Postagulous
Monday, November 01, 2004
Sucky Crap
When I was talking with Mr. Smiley’s grandkid while we were about to look at Kurt’s gigantic mech costume, I said something sucked. Now, this kid is a teenager, not a three year old. Plus, I don’t really consider the word “suck” to be a curse word. Faith, a next door neighbor, also pointed out that I had said “crap” earlier. Mr. Smiley’s grandkid said that crap wasn’t a bad word, but sucks is. Faith though exactly the opposite, but she says both anyway.
I commented that in our culture, there are just some words that are bad words and others that aren’t. You can say BM or feces to mean poop, but if you use the S-word or in this case the word crap, that’s objectionable to some people. There may not be much distinction between the words in meaning, but some are just considered uglier ways to phrase it. Mr. Smiley’s grandkid said, “But they aren’t really bad words.”
“No, they are really bad words.” I responded. But I didn’t get a chance to continue my line of thought, since some candy scarfing opportunity had come up or something. It was around nine at night, so trick or treating was actually over.
The Need For Bad Words
The philosophical question as far as different words for dookie should not be “Why are some turdy words worse than others?” but “What is it about Western culture that makes it necessary for us to define some words as being crude?”
Often, we westerners are shocked when we see a toddler in Japan wearing a shirt with the S-word in English on it. However, we would find a shirt that says “Poopoo Factory” on it to be cute.
We did discuss that in China, for example, they don’t have lots of different words to mean the same thing. In fact, they have very few words, and their meaning is mostly based on context (and tone, etc). Japan is similar in that it doesn’t have lots of words. Heck, the same is true for Spanish, but Spanish does set aside a certain set of words as vulgar. Actually, they also acknowledge our cursey words.
Heck, I used the word “copulate” in front of my mother-in-law Saturday night. But that was only because some neighbor’s toddler was goping my daughter earlier that day. Ok, maybe not groping, but he was trying to kiss her. Sometimes I wish my daughter was more violent toward strangers, at least that little pervert. Kick him in the nuts!
