Dirty words

Ripe new naughty words

To my way of thinking (oh, geeze!) one of the most absurd concepts to be etched into the granite of society is the one about dirty words. Personally, I think it’s insanity.

We’re conditioned to respond with anything from lust to rage to outrage by the publication, broadcast, or mention of certain words. You know what they are.

The irony I see in this is that all words, clean and dirty, are quite simply symbols that stand for concepts. By their very nature, words are abstract ideas. That makes them fantasies. Our response to a word, whatever the word may be and whatever the response may be, is a fantasy.

Defining a word as off limits to polite society is an exercise in insanity for these major reasons:

1. We create polite words that mean the exact same thing as the dirty words. It’s OK to say the polite words but not OK to say the dirty words? How weird is that? (Plenty weird!)
2. If you don’t know what the words mean, such as if someone is speaking to you in a foreign language you don’t speak, you have no emotional reaction whatsoever to the most raw words and phrases imaginable.
3. Even when we speak a common language, our personal history with words is different. Different upbringings, religious histories, and cultural environments all shape how we use and hear words.
4. Besides that, different countries that share a common language often have words dirty to their own culture but not to neighboring cultures where the same word is still clean or not dirty enough.
5. Some of us, it might be said, are dirty word friendly. We embrace these words as delights, sources of intrigue, thrill pills for the mind. Others of us are not dirty word friendly, and the use of them brings up all the stress and disgust we were taught to feel.

Words have the power to injure and the power to heal, but all that action transpires inside the mind of the perceiver. It’s what we tell ourselves that is important.

In some people’s lives, words have had a devastating impact. That’s because even while words are fantasies, there is a body within the society that takes them with this-is-reality seriousness. People have been maimed, tortured, jailed, fined, or killed for the words that they use.

Among these is the odyssey of the Federal Communications Commission and how it has defined seven truly dirty words, truly dirty in the sense that broadcasters can be fined vast sums of money for uttering them either accidentally or on purpose. Insanity.

Do you not think it is insane that the word fucking is worthy of fine or jail time but the newly minted word effing can safely be used in public? The new word is just the old word with remodeled spelling, but it passes through the dirty word security gate without triggering the alarm buzzer.

How words become dirty

The insanity stems from how a word becomes dirty in the first place. Until it becomes defined as a dirty word, it is just an abstract sound, a random combination of letters. I like to imagine how it all started, the lineage of a dirty word. To best imagine this, maybe we should think up a new dirty word.

Flup.

I’m sorry. I should have warned you to send the kids out of the room and to cover the ears of all remaining virgins.

Anyway, once you have decided on a combination of letters, you need to decide on a precise meaning for your dirty word. Is it a noun or a verb or both? What mental images do you assign to its use? I will let you do this step on your own.

One of the best ways to launch a dirty word is to associate it with promiscuous sex. Write it in lipstick on the hilly slope of some woman’s almost or fully bared breast. Nipple exposure is optional.

A good prerequisite for a dirty word is that its use should inspire an erection in young adult males and vaginal lubrication in young adult females. Primarily this is because while dirty words are often used to express violent thoughts and emotions, they also do double-duty as cerebral aphrodisiacs. (I think this also contributes to word insanity.)

The next part is even more difficult but definitely key. You need to find someone else who will agree with you about this new word. That person must share your enthusiasm that it is absolutely, positively, undeniably a dirty word.

As one might well imagine, if a word is brand new to the listener, it won’t be throwing much of an emotional punch. How excited, aroused, or inflamed is someone going to get over the word flup or the practice of flupping if it’s virgin fresh? How do you make it sizzle? You need to get people to buy into your vision that this is raw and foul and thrilling to say.

This is probably best accomplished by offending someone in authority, be it a judge, religious leader, or someone with the capability of violent reaction. Sorry, but the grim reality is that unless your word offends someone capable of making you a martyr for your creative semantics, your cause won’t go anywhere.

Religion is arguably still the best route to stardom for your dirty word. Some mortal moral authority should convince the populace that God is grossly offended by your new word. Even if you only flup in your heart, God will become grossly offended and might smite you down with a freak accident. You need to be convinced that when you use words like flup you’re rolling down a fast track to the fires of Hell.

Yet having just one religious authority won’t pull much weight. As wolves have discovered, you need a pack to accomplish great deeds. Enough religious leaders need to climb aboard your dirty word train. They need to form a common bond of outrage at what the word flup does to send morality down the toilet.

Speaking of which, it is a grand and glorious idea to link your original dirty word to the other dirty words. If the word flup is alleged to be as foul as the others with substantially more longevity, you’ll be in much better shape. It’s similar to establishing a link to a popular–or unpopular, depending on your point of view–terrorist group. You want to give the impression that people who shamelessly flup are totally bad company.

At the same time, you need to make the word flup popular with an in crowd. The classic in crowd is the bohemian subculture–artists, writers, philosophers, and lovers who live and act free of regard for conventional rules and practices. If the word flup is not perceived as flupping cool to say by bohemian trend-setters, then where will your cause be? If you can’t inspire a loyal group of followers eager to flup the night away, religious leaders will have much less to be proactive about, let alone negactive.

This would not be as tall an order as it might at first seem. Religious leaders often have hair-trigger responses to social trends and seem eager to find new things to rail against. It helps built dramatic tension, which lures the congregation in for another Sunday’s sin-bashing and tithing. As soon as the righteous orators condemn the loose, immoral people for their foul language, it would automagically incite social revolutionaries to flaunt their flupping. The system works like clockwork, almost as if one savvy entity could cash in playing two sides against one another. For instance, they could sell both pro-flupping and anti-flupping t-shirts.

Pornography, of course, is a classic launch pad for new dirty words. It’s already got social conflict going for it with a vast army of opponents. Hire some naughty, nasty, name-calling pornstitutes to walk your talk with the appropriate wiggles and jiggles. Once your word works its way into porn titles, you’re well on your way.

Posterity in action

Years and decades must pass before a given original dirty word becomes as prominent as the words you can’t say on American television. There’s actually intense competition for those top spots where blood will spill and mouths will be washed out with soap and hefty fines will be levied and free men will be jailed when they utter flup and its derivatives.

So plan for the long haul.

And think of this whole process when people get all worked up over those already-famous dirty words. It’s not the word. It’s all the ugliness and angst that people have shoveled onto the word. It’s what you and they perceive the word to mean and the stories you and they make up about its use.