Bad Words

I've been known in the past to say that I didn't believe that there are any "bad" words.  I've long held that there is nothing inherently "wrong" or "bad" with certain four-letter words other than that we're told from a young age that there is, and we just accept that as fact and do our best to not get caught by our parents saying them.  

There's an extra cookie in it for you if you don't tell Mom about all those F-bombs I've dropped. 

My belief has long been that words are words, and they have no power unto themselves until they're given intent and context by their user.  You can be mean or hurt someone's feelings or insult someone quite effectively without using a "bad" word.  Cuss words are merely a kind of lazy shorthand to those effects, but that's only because, for whatever reason, we've all previously agreed that those specific words alone have that power.

Then I had children and was forced to reassess my stances on... well, pretty much everything.  Suddenly I had to watch my language in my own house because the sponges kids absorbed and repeated everything, and I didn't want to get a call from the school and have to explain where my child got such colorful language from.  

"Learn how to bleeping drive, bleepnugget!" -Mom

I never really stopped believing that there were no bad words, but neither did I want to rage a one-man war, with my children as the weapons, against a societal standard I didn't fully agree with. 

Then, shortly after a recent conversation with some other parents about this very subject, it hit me.  There are bad words out there, but they're not the words you might be thinking.

I'm not talking about the "swear" words most people think of when someone says "bad word", I'm talking about certain pejoratives; slurs that were created solely to reduce a person to a single trait and insult them for that one aspect of their person, be it their race or their sexuality or their nationality or their gender or whatever. 

These words were created solely to hurt someone, and have no other use. There is no other context or intent under which they can be used except to diminish and hurt someone.  These, then, are the "bad" words.  These are the words children (or anyone) should not be taught or tolerated to use.

So while I'll continue to give the expected lip service against the use of cuss words, my real goal is to teach my children that it isn't the words you say so much as how you use them that matters.

Unless they're any of those "bad" words.  Those are right the bleep out.



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