Top 5 Things You Can’t Say Anymore

Things You Can’t Say Anymore

Apparently, there are words that you can’t say anymore. Words that were, just a few years ago, perfectly acceptable and mainstream. I don’t mean obviously horrible words like N bombs and other slurs, I just mean words that were pretty conventional not long ago and now when I innocently drop one of them make me sound like a full-on purveyor of genocide. Mind you, some of this hoo-ha is a bit out of control and part of the problem are the overly sensitive, politically correct, hipster douche bags who won’t even watch a football game because the violence makes their beard hair curl and their skinny jeans cinch up around infantile penises. So, I guess, take this with a grain of salt.

Things have changed a lot over the years. I remember watching programs like Leave it to Beaver and they couldn’t even show that Ward and June slept in the same bed. They had these little twin beds. As if they showed a queen sized mattress in their bedroom we would suddenly be filled with thoughts of Ward sticking it to June good and hard. Hell, you couldn’t even show a toilet on TV. Where did the Brady kids pee? Like seeing a toilet would make me think of Marcia taking a shit and result in a need for martial law? However, it was societally acceptable to call a black guy, “boy.” Bob Hope gets fined by the FCC for saying “hormone” and the police use water cannons on people protesting for civil rights. Seems odd.

Today, though, on TV, you can show two people hammering the shit out of each other on the freaking toilet but I offend when I say “retard?” I’m lost.

I guess in hindsight they aren’t the kindest of words and I’m not really sure how “retard” ever became societally acceptable but I grew up using them and never thought of them as offensive, they were just descriptive words.

When I was in elementary school they had a classroom in the basement where they educated the “slower” kids. Back then we called them retards. The word makes me wince now but back then even the teachers called them the retarded class. There was always a rumor served with a stern warning that these kids liked to bite and if they broke your skin with their green pointed teeth that you would be doing time in the basement class right along with them. Like being mentally challenged, I think that’s what we say now, is caused by some mutant virus.

My mother used to be a piano teacher and every Wednesday night we had to go to Bart’s house so she could teach him and the rest of his creepy family how to play. Bart was this pale green color and he had pointed fingers. He and his siblings would hide in the walls and jump out at you if you happened to walk by. Certainly this kid was green from hiding in the walls and was clearly deprived of sunlight but how does one get pointed fingers? And why were they in the walls in the first place? Meanwhile, my school has a room full of “retarded” people and this green little bat-fingered mutant is in the “normal” class? WTF?

Writer’s note:

My favorite joke of all time relies heavily on the use of the word retard and I am going to have a hard time giving this up. In fact, it’s the only joke I can remember. It goes like this, what’s better than winning a gold medal in the Special Olympics? Not being retarded.

I can’t help it. It’s funny to me and I know it’s horrifying.

Oriental is bad to say anymore, too. Apparently it is a general racist term given to the Asians by the British who colonialized the region to rape and pillage resources until they were all used up. They treated the Asian people like garbage in addition to this name change and now I guess I shouldn’t be wondering why they find it offensive. I suppose if some snotty assed British d-bag came into my country and announced that they were in charge and decided to start calling me a cracker, I would be offended too. I am working on getting rid of this word but the progress is slow. I mean no harm though.

I have become accustomed to labeling something that I don’t like as “gay.” I don’t mean anything derogatory to gay people, in fact, I don’t even think of a gay person when I say it. It really makes no sense to use the word “gay” in this context as I’ve never heard anyone say, “that’s so fucking heterosexual,” when they are upset. My friend Brad, who happens to be flamingly gay, in a personal, vainglorious crusade against the word “gay” being used in this manner, does, in fact, use the phrase, “that’s so heterosexual.” He sounds like an idiot.

Webster’s defines the word “crippled” as lame, lamed, disabled and/or impeded. It goes on to offer some synonyms as if the damage done wasn’t enough:

Bad, castrated, damaged, debilitated, disabled, disarmed, disqualified, emasculated, game, halt, halting, hamstrung, handicapped, hobbling, hog-tied, incapacitated, inoperative, invalidated, lame, limping, maimed, paralyzed, prostrate, spavined, weak, weakened

How was this word ever adopted to describe a person on crutches or in a wheelchair? No wonder people get pissed when you use it. I don’t even know what “spavined” means but it sounds shitty.

The last word on my list is Columbus as in Christopher Columbus. Every October 12^th Facebook and Twitter erupt in protest to the celebration of the anniversary of this guys “discovering” of America. First of all, he didn’t discover shit. People were here already and he and his merry band of sailors managed to infect the majority of them with smallpox to the point of nearly driving them to extinction. It seems odd, in the United States to have a holiday to celebrate some Italian dude’s inadvertent viral genocide against an entire continent of indigenous people but I don’t complain because this major d-bag usually gets me the day off.

Things You Can’t Say Anymore

Retard

Oriental

Gay

Crippled

Columbus