Thursday, March 05, 2009

bad words

I really don't like to read bad words. I also don't like to hear bad words. So after reading and endless stream of status updates on facebook from a "friend" from college full of expletives, I got tired and he was "unfriended". I had tried to put limits on how much I saw of this "friends" information but it didn't ever limit the number of status updates I was reading. Thus, the boot.

And here's the thing, I understand that somedays you have a bad day and its just a bad word but after awhile my thinking is that surely there is a better, more descriptive adjective that you could use to describe your situation. By and large, I like to think of my "friends" or at least people I'm acquainted with as being fairly well educated. I think all of them have a high school diploma and most a college diploma. My thinking is that if you've earned a high school diploma (and even if you haven't) that chances are you know the parts of speech and at some point you've used more descriptive phrases to describe a circumstance. I have a 10 yr. old neice who describes her feelings about extended responses to math answers on the ISATs terribly well and she doesn't use bad words. Certainly a person with a college diploma can manage. Consistent use of bad words make me think you are very low in many ways.

I try to avoid bad words because I don't want to say them. Reading them. Watching them. I do it consistently enough and my kid is going to be saying bad words. And who wants a blond haired, blue eyed 4 yr. old saying bad words? The other week Jonathan and I watched "The Departed", a great Godfathery, Boston Cop, bad guy show. It was long but we really enjoyed it. What kept it from being a completely brillant movie for me was the bad words. And the problem is that it was technically necessary to accurately set the scene of these bad boy, godfather-esque, wrong side of the tracks, Irish Boston cops. But it was so consitent that by the end of the over 2 hr movie Jonathan and I had to watch what we were saying not to be letting the bad words fly like Irish Boston Cops. You know what I'm talking about here, right? We're better educated than that. Jonathan's got an advanced degree in English, certainly he could think up something more metaphorical to say.

All of that to say, unless you are an Irish Boston Cop or work for the Godfather, I expect more from you.

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