WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE !!

A crappie

When was a little kid, I was eager for words.  One day I was walking with my mother on the bank of a river with a lot of dead fish.  I said, “This is a crappy beach!”  

My mother was amused.  “Do you know what that word means?”

“A crappy is a kind of fish,” I instructed her.

Another time the big boy across the street, whom I followed with adoring attention, tried to get rid of me by using a piece of red brick to print a four letter word on the pavement.  It started with “F.”  I sounded it out.  “That’s not even a word,” I complained.  “It doesn’t mean anything.”  

“Go ask your mother what it means,” he sneered.

Teaching 7^th graders whose hormones have kicked in means self-censoring for the sake of making progress in spite of the great obsession of sex.  Try asking for examples of infinitives and you will get “to poke,” “to screw,” “to ball,” etc.  If you object, you’ll get nothing but blank innocence.

Teaching cross-culture presents another problem.  The Blackfeet 7^th grade boys began shouting a Blackfeet word at each other in the hallway, with great hilarity and quick looks to see whether I were listening.  I took the word to our older female Blackfeet speaker to see what it meant.  Female parts “down there.”  I cornered the shouters and informed them it was not a nice word.  (What made me think THAT?)  “It means vagina,” I said.

Now they were stumped.  “What’s a vagina?” they asked.  I lost patience.  “A cunt.”  “Oh.”  

Of course, “The Vagina Dialogues” was once meant to be shocking but not TOO shocking.  The play is not “The Cunt Dialogues.”  Is a phrase like “the hairy oyster” shocking or just puzzling?  Is all this gynephobic?

by Banksy

Is Apple Computers obscene?  Jony Ive, the new head, is being interviewed.  The journalist says, “That office has a Playmobil likeness of Ive, a Banksy print of the Queen with the face of a chimpanzee, and a poster saying ‘believe in your fucking self. Stay up all fucking night ... think about all the fucking possibilities.’”  Is that acceptable or is that lamentable (something like the culture of ZITS, the comic strip), or should the police go into the main office of Apple and tear those images off the wall?  I remind you that Apple has just replaced ATand T on the stock market indicator.

A helpful counselor once told me I was counterphobic, meaning that when I see something scary or maybe just troublesome or maybe intriguing, I go towards it.  This gets me into a lot of trouble but it means my horizons are as jagged as mountains.  I came to the rez half-a-century ago, I started reading the blogging of Tim Barrus eight years ago, I read all about sex and I mean “molecularly” though I really like Gene Robinson’s writing, I went door-to-door as an officer in a city, and tried to respond to the members of UU’s congregations who are highly assorted.  (Well, in a couple of dimensions, not all.)  This has doubled my vocabulary.  (The trouble with theological vocabulary is that only seminary grads understand the concepts.  That's on purpose.)

But the hardest population, the one that really tries to shut me up, is my family, esp. the ones in my generation.  They learned from our parent generation that the way to be safe is to be respectable, prosperous, and conforming.  They do not know they are these things or that they have not been safe.  They do something like a “pay wall,” paid with conforming, as well as simply “not knowing.”  People die, are born, marry, have heart attacks -- I’m not told because “we didn’t want you to feel bad.”  If I start being too uncomfortable to them, they stop emailing.

When the most prosperous come to visit, they are horrified, because I do not fit them.  The suburban engineer brought a bottle of wine as a hostess gift.  I do not drink -- never have.  Our grandmother was WCTU.  Their son is alcoholic to the point of not holding a job, not being able to pass classes, living in his parents’ basement in middle age.  They don’t see the connection.  But they endlessly read about the problem.  

I try not to say “fuck” when nice people are around unless they are under thirty.  The word is a marker for nasty people who probably even “do it,” even without purple pills.  I haven’t done it for decades but I come from the time when Bergen Evans tried valiantly to put cursing into proportion and so did George Carlin.  Evans was interested in the split in early Brit culture when the upper classes tried to be French (venison and swine) while the lower classes spoke Anglo-Saxon (deer and pigs -- also shit, cunt, fuck and prick -- they liked words with final plosive consonants).  He was well-aware that the REALLY wicked stuff was in Latin. 

I once told a high school class that they could say all their bad words if they used the Latin to name the not-nice fact.  (Flatulence instead of farts, for instance.)  This slowed them down because they couldn’t remember the unfamiliar big words, but it also led to some funny dialogue.  “Excuse me for flatulating.”)   Evans was interested because ’57-’61 was a time when new people were coming into the middle class, not least because the GI Bill was putting a lot of “salty” veterans through college.  It was also the thin edge of rock ‘n roll that would thicken into Marilyn Manson.

My ministerial colleagues decided I was “salty,” though at least one could match me sheep-joke for sheep-joke.   Will telling sheep jokes lead to bestiality?  (What actual harm does bestiality do anyway?)  The group that is most often offended by me is “at-risk” boys, who develop their own standards and don’t want to think about tubby old women knowing them, much less having opinions.  They stigmatize my demographic category.  

In my own thought, I’ve gone to survival as the definition of what is acceptable.  If language over-eloquence will help you survive, go for it.  But many have taken a position that they consider to be virtue when it is really more like “irreproachability” -- behavior controlled by the opinions of others, whether it’s being a litterbug or a fire bug.  If bad language will help me communicate with someone, I’ll use it.  But I’m constantly resorting to Google and urban slang sites to understand whether I’m being slagged and others are constantly coming up with new obscurities and shocking metaphors to keep me out.  Sometimes they denote activities I didn’t know were possible.

How can I be insulted if I don’t know what’s being said?   It’s attitude.  You have to “read” or “hear” the attitude.  It’s often double, both swashbuckling and serious threat.  Sometimes it’s defensive and sometimes it is meant to be traumatic.  Be careful whom you call “nigger.”  Even if you hear one black person use the term in friendship with another black person and you think you’re part of the inner circle.  

When it comes to Indians, don’t say “squaw,”  "buck," “half-breed,” “papoose.”   Don’t call me a “wannabe” because, like Popeye, I yam what I yam, and there’s no category for me that I’ll admit to.  (That’s not ending a sentence with a preposition because a preposition without an object is an adverb and an adverb can go anywhere.)