Flip, Fudge, Fetch!

While we're talking about BAD words. I would like to voice that there is no such thing. That is also what I tell my kids. There is only intent. Across the ocean, our worst words are meaningless. BAD words from across the ocean seem laughable to us, like a word in Sri Lanka that translates to "you descend from lizards."

If someone is trying to offend you, they will likely succeed with or without the four letter words. Those words only have as much power as YOU give them. It's all in your head. I tell my kids those words offend a lot of people and they should consider that if they choose to say them. You know... manners.

They don't offend me at all. My wife and all of her brothers and sister were raised mormon and they have the most peculiar reactions, primarily to the "F" word. My wife says the "S" word only under unbearably stressful circumstances, like if she drops her fork at lunch or if she's at her family Christmas party, in a church, striking out notes to popular Christmas songs on lengths of metal tubes and she hits her note at the wrong moment. Yeah, she'll spit out the poo poo word right in front of her grandparents. If I didn't tell you that story, her parents would at their first opportunity.

Her brothers are even funnier. We were driving a couple weeks ago and her brother acted all surprised, "Oh, you guys listen to Ben Folds? I love him."

It was everything I could do not to say, "Yeah, remember about 3 years ago I was giving you a ride and I played that Ben Fold's song 'Army' and it says the 'F' word and right at that moment you and your other brother both looked at me like I would go to hell if I didn't immediately grab the CD and chuck it out of the window, then repeated move the car back and forth over the foul thing?"

Another funny sibling-in-law thing is the whole "refusal to watch R-rated movies." They have a mental library of every movie that is rated R so they can quickly agree or decline to watch any movie you mention. On Halloween night I took that Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow" movie over to their house. Before then, I never gave any thought to the rating on it. I may as well have showed up with a case of beer. I said it wasn't that bad and that I thought it was strange they automatically refused to watch any R movie.

I said it should be the content that mattered. They looked at the box and read the warning "violence, gore and a scene of sensuality." I didn't want to start a big debate but I was thinking they see ten times the amount of decapitations in one turn at Ninja Gaiden on their X-box and that there was more sex and nudity in "The Notebook" (which is one of my sister-in-law's favorites), but it's PG-13 so you can feel good about watching that with Jesus. My brother-in-law finalized things with the statement "you're not missing anything by not watching R-rated movies." To that I say, "Yes, I am. A lot of my favorite movies are rated R."