I Swear….

Language is a funny thing. I’ve been thinking about it often for the past five days or so. Using audible sounds and noises that come out of our mouth and are heard by our ears, we can give direction, share feelings, maintain relationships or start wars (or get the whole country pissed at you by thinking you want a segregated country…sorry, everyone else is taking shots at Trent Lott, so I figured I would too. Hehe).

I think the biggest thing that got me contemplating language though was something that I noticed while listening to the radio in my truck. Amazing as this may seem, certain songs had words that were deleted or masked by other sounds because they are “bad.” Then I would hear another song use the same word and it would come out loud and clear. Now for a bit I was a little wondrous of how one song would get bleeped, but another song could get away with the same word.

Then I had another thought…can words really be bad in the first place? Think about it, they’re just words.

What exactly is it that makes a word “bad?” Is it that there is somehow something mystically evil about how it is spelled? I can’t imagine that being it. Could it be the meaning of the word? I don’t think so because for every “bad” words, there are other words that are kosher and have the exact same meaning and can be used fairly interchangeably. Is it because (as my mom will sometimes say in instances when someone says “fart” instead of “toot”) some people think that certain words are more coarse or forceful or something? I think that’s about the closest I’ve come to an answer.

Personally, I have no problem with saying anything I want to say, or hearing what other people say (although there are times that I do restrict my vocabulary on account of situational circumstances), and I really can’t see how words themselves can be “bad.” But somehow people have to uphold their artificial senses of morality and try to separate words into “good” words and “bad” words. They have to teach their children that some words aren’t good to say (or in today’s culture, that you can’t use them until you’re older), which is really a stupid idea since it makes most kids want to use them all the more. Child psychologists will tell you that in the majority of kids, telling them not to do something only makes them want to do it more. Although I believe that’s totally true, I also think that when it happens to be something that the adult can’t provide a good reason as to why the child should avoid that thing (i.e. saying “Just because” or “That’s the way it is” when the child asks why not), that it almost creates a mystical captivation with seeing why the thing is so wrong or bad.

Funny thing is that many of the very people who get offended by certain words, mostly “swear words” will still watch TV and pay to go to movies where they can hear the same words. As I said, the sense of morality is artificial; a façade to hide behind so they can have something to point to when they look at themselves in the mirror and say “See, I’m a good person.”

I say we do away totally with censorship. I say that people stop being so damn anal and stop trying to make certain words worse than other words. If it is unacceptable for me to refer to my backside using a word for donkey, then perhaps all the synonyms should be just as bad, because the words refer to the same thing. I say that people stop being afraid to speak their mind so as to not offend people who can’t face the fact that life isn’t as pretty and poetic as they’d like it to be. I say that we group those who would dictate to us what is “vulgar” and what isn’t with the rest of the people who would try and tell us how to live our lives, and let them be seen as the societal hemorrhoids that they are.

So yeah, that’s what I think about language.

“…but until then, better off dead. A smile on the lips and a hole in the head. Better off dead, yeah better than this…take me away cause there’s nothing to miss.” Bad Religion