The times, they are a changin’. It used to be, back in the wild and swingin’ 70s (or 60s, I don’t really know because that was a long time ago and I’m old enough as it is) that, according to George Carlin, there were seven words you couldn’t say on television. Some of these words were pretty high on the old cursometer, (the system of measurement for just how bad a curse word is), but some weren’t so bad, and a few are actually said on TV in this day and age. Words like: shit, piss and tits can be heard in any given episode of South Park, or Two and a Half Men (actually, I don’t know if that’s true since I don’t watch the dumb thing, I’ve just wanted to take a crack at that show for months now, but couldn’t figure out how to work it into an entry. Honestly, who watches it anyway? All the chicks Charlie Sheen has boned? That’s the only way to account for the high Neilson rating).
Is this the fault of American society? Have we become so loose with our morals and ethics that we have allowed curse words to infiltrate the everyday life of our culture, tearing it asunder? Have we lost sight of family values and the principles that this wonderful country (America. Motto: Either you’re with us, or we’ll unlawfully invade your country, rape your land and your women and make off with your livestock!) was founded upon? Has the proliferation of curse words in our society been the catalyst that caused the moral bankruptcy of America?
Don’t be a moron.
Curse words have been around for as long as man has accidentally dropped heavy objects on his toes. Curse words (or cuss words, whatever) are the very definition of freedom and liberty. By exclaiming curse words whenever we feel the desire, we are announcing our independence from the “accepted” everyday language used for business and the subjugation of our spirits by a totalitarian and nosy government.
When I was a kid, it was different. Me and my friends cussed when we hung out, to show how cool we were, how old we were and because our parents weren’t around. Naturally, had our parents been around when these cussfests were going on, I’m sure that any future kids I had will have been born with black eyes from the serious beatdown I would have received. (That is the most convoluted sentence involving past-conditional and future-conditional tenses I’ve ever written. I don’t think it came out right.)
I could never get the hang of cussing around my parents. It just didn’t seem right. I know other kids who could cuss around their parental units (and who called their parents by their first names, which was and always will be a weird thing that only WPs do) and would urge me to also cuss around their parents. But I just couldn’t. There were two worlds growing up, the world of kids, who cuss around each other and will sometimes write notes in school that consist of nothing but cuss words (just to show how many they know) and the world of adults who take cussing for granted because they’ve been doing it for so long, but still hold onto the ability to do so, thereby robbing kids of the freedom.
I always held my tongue around adults. I didn’t want them to know that I knew more cuss words, (in more languages) than they did. While they were busy censoring themselves, I was easily filling in the blanks in the conversation, Mad-Libs style, with great delight. Speaking of cussing in other languages, my elementary school, from 1st to 6th grade, was all in French. We all learned a bunch of cuss words in French that we could use at home around our unsuspecting parents, and that was great. But we also discovered French words that sound like cuss words in English, and we would enjoy hours of saying them around adults and then defending ourselves as just being really cultured. The French word for seal, by the way, is very similar to the English word one uses to tell another to go fornicate themselves. Try using it in polite dinner conversation; you’ll be amazed by the results.
But a problem as arisen. There are no new or interesting cuss words. We’ve run out of expletives to hurl at each other. Sure, in recent years, we’ve developed new insults, “asshat,” comes to mind, as does the suffix (and this has only recently become a suffix, I’d like to point out) “tard” tacked on to the end of something (i.e. asstard, hattard, or asstardhat) and I’m very happy that “douchebag” has make such a strong comeback since the 80s. But none of those are cuss words and that saddens me. We need to create a new cuss word.
Of course, to create a new cuss word, you need a niche to fill. Cuss words have to somehow involve bodily processes, activities that involve the body, body parts or just funny sounding names for body parts, like taint, coccyx or uvula. Sadly, these niches are already pretty well filled, and the Tourettes crowd is making great progress in combining these words into new hybrids that make no sense but sounds dirty as hell. They’ve got that covered. Which means we have look to the second reason curse words are made: to insult or make fun of other races.
Recently, it has come to my attention that some white people feel as if they’ve been unfairly treated. They feel that in order to make great strides for unity in this piece of land we call the U.S.* (motto: Supporting US Americans in Africa and the Middle East, such as, for years) that there should be a derogatory word for white people. Black people aren’t making too much of a deal about this, we just call whites stupid or crazy and just go about our business. But that’s not enough for some people. They want to be insulted! They want to be able to rally around a word, steal its power and bury it in a symbolic, yet completely pointless funeral service. And I’m here to oblige.
It’s time we came up with a cuss word for white people. Let’s bring them down a peg or two, shall we? I guess honky and cracker just aren’t good enough insults anymore. We need to create a stronger, more hate-filled word that scores high on the cursometer and will cause children to cry, women to cover their ears and men to start land wars in Asia. Any suggestions?
*Located on any map, just above Mexico and just below Canada. You’re welcome.
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