Today I was thinking about what my life would be like if my life was like a movie character's life in that I could have sound effects and a soundtrack playing around me all the time. It would help communicate my mood and thoughts in a larger dynamic. I actually think about this a lot, but that's a bit beside the point.

It occurred to me that if I were ever to be able to have that happen, aside from how annoying it would be to everyone else, I'd probably offend a lot of people with the lyrics; containing obscenities and such. I was a little dismayed that my dream may never see fruition (hey, there's a small chance), but was then struck by how absolutely ridiculous it is for words to be 'bad' or 'obscene'.

'Bad' Words

There are no such things as 'bad' words. Let's just get that out of the way. Words may be 'obscene', but words cannot make moral judgments and are not responsible for anything. Words cannot be 'bad', period.

Obscene Words

How in the world does a word become obscene? Words are words for crying out loud! Obviously, the obscene part comes in when we attach a whole bunch of inherent meaning in a word. We dictate that this word or that word is obscene. We let the FCC write the white papers, but we'll enforce the specifications. Sure, different obscenities have different origins and some may even have more reasonable origins than others ('bitch' for example), but the point is that we create all of the inherently negative things about obscene words.

Words communicate ideas. Perhaps the obscenity comes from the idea that is being communicated. 'Oh no! Don't say that word! It relates to fornication, probably forceful in nature! How horrible is that!' Well, it's not horrible. It may be crude, but not horrible. Take a sentence laden with obscenities and remove all obscene things about the sentence; you're often left with not much. So what? If we just let everyone say anything and everything that they want, the influx of the use of obscenities will relatively instantly kill their predisposition to obscenity. If everyone walks around salting their sentences with 'fuck' and 'shit', we'd start to gloss over them like we do with contractions. They'd be slang filler words used as poor parts of speech.

My Children

If I ever have children, I'm going to forbid any such thing as an obscene word. There won't be rules that can be broken. The idea of a forbidden word will just not exist. I'll define anything the kid wants to know. I'll let him or her use whatever word he/she chooses to use for any situation and any scenario he or she finds himself/herself. What will happen? People might get mad at him/her, but that's it. He/she will grow up not knowing what an obscene word really is. There might be learned obscenities (true obscenities in these cases) from circumstantial experiences, but those can all be dealt with.

How silly we are sometimes, the human race.