A few weeks ago, whilst running late to get the kids to the bus to school, I had a car in front of me trying to turn right across a busy 3 lane road. Now I do this every morning and am used to it. I know how to judge the traffic and can usually wait. The driver in front of me was not used to it. After the third time when she could have turned and didn’t I lost it in the car and let off a stream of words that had the kids in hysterics.

Ever since then Japs has been exclaiming ‘You fucked up duck’ for my fuck a duck and Immy has been heard to use fucktard on occasion. We have spoken about appropriate uses of words and how there are some words that it is best not to use away from home or the car and not in certain company.

At work recently someone was trying to place levels on swear words- shit being acceptable most of the time, fuck sometimes, but ‘the C word’ was off limits totally.

This got me thinking. Was cunt off limits because of feminie connotations? I have heard women call each other all sorts of terms such as ’slag’ as terms of endearment. Cunt is offlimits, but then again dick-head isn’t? Is there some sort of inequality here?

Then tonight over dinner Immy was telling me the nicknames she and two friends had for each other. One was bitchface, another slut and she was whore. These are ten year old girls we are talking about! I asked what the meaning was of these words. A bitch is not only a female dog, but also a bad thing to call a female. She knew that slut and whore meant the same thing and gave the definition ‘Someone who is not meant to be in the world and is stuck up and self centred.’ When I told her that usually they were words used to refer to people who had sex with lots of other people, Mr 7 (who I did not know was listening in!) said ‘Like James Bond and stuff.’

Whoa! Hold on a minute! Now I had been careful not to place a gender on those words (even though she had told me they referred to women) but Japs response floored me a bit. Not wanting to continue the conversation with the kids, I left it at that. But it has me thinking. We have all heard the discourse that men are referred to as studs and that is good and women are whores and sluts and that is bad. But who decides that these are bad words?

The call for phonetic spelling is out there again. And people are outraged (or is that peepol r owtragd?) because it is a break with tradition and long live the tradition!

My call is that words are words and words have meanings but those meeanings are varied and depend on the user, the intention and the many truths that are inherent in any discourse (hi Foucault!). Perhaps these ten year old girls are right calling each other bitchface, whore and slut? Perhaps when seven year old boys grow up they won’t see any negative connotations with words describing females?

Oh and as for the dickhead fucktard in the car in front of mine who was told to fuck a duck, we did meet the bus in time, but why did you go when you did? Even I wouldn’t have taken that narrow a risk (and you had missed 3 prior opportunities!) Or did you really hear my ranting from behind?

Tags: swearing, words

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Stuff, feminism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.