The Bad Word

“And then,” I told my 5-year-old friend Lucas, “after I’d spilled the flour all over the kitchen floor, I went to put the flour back on the shelf and when I was doing that, I knocked over the sugar jar and spilled the sugar too.”

Photo by Cath Smith on Unsplash

This was a story that had Lucas’ name writ large across it.

“You made a mess!” he shouted happily.

“I certainly did,” I agreed. “And it got worse because when I went to put the sugar back, I spilled a glass of water, and – oh, no! – it became a sticky mess too.”

“A sticky mess!” confirmed Lucas: I suppose it was humanly possible for a boy to be much happier than he was at that point, but it was not immediately apparent how. Then he looked thoughtful.

“But why hadn’t you moved the glass of water out of the way?” he wondered.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “I guess I must just be pretty stupid, don’t you think?”

Abruptly, the conversation had been plunged into ice. Lucas stared at me, his jaw dropped in horror, his eyes a blue blaze of disapproval.

“You said a bad word,” he said.

Oh, lord, I thought. It was true that my language at the time when the incident had occurred had not been what you would describe as maidenly; but I was certain that I had cleaned it up for the Lucas-rated edition. Desperately, I re-ran through my mind my retelling of it.

Lucas drew himself up to his full 44 inches of height.

“You,” he accused me coldly, “said the ‘s’ word.”

My heart dropped to the pit of my stomach. I had said what? How could I have let myself do that in front of a 5-year-old? How could I ever look him in the eye again? How could I ever look his mother in the eye again? How could I ever look myself in the eye again?

Lucas’ mother Amy laid a gentle hand on her son’s shoulder and mouthed to me the word that had so offended.

“They’re taught not to say that in schools these days,” she said.

The word “stupid” is obviously never a compliment. I would not dream of seriously using it to someone’s face; and even if I were suggesting a less than towering intellect in their absence, I would probably try to find a more diplomatic way to phrase it. But it appears that lately in the American education system – and apparently to an increasing extent in the British, too – it has shot up the charts of the terrible unsayable to attain so dizzying a pinnacle of unacceptability that it is flat-out forbidden to use it under any circumstances whatsoever, not even jokingly, not even about oneself.

I confess that my immediate reaction to this latest prohibition was an exasperated, “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” But then I began to think about it; and the more I think about it, the more attractive, even intriguing, the idea becomes. Until now, the words that have shocked in our society have been confined to blasphemies and obscenities, with, more recently, the occasional racial slur quite rightly thrown in for opprobrium too. To add a generalized personal insult into the pantheon of the expletives introduces a whole new category to the game; and it is a category that, now it has been established, I most fervently wish had been present in the education system when I was young myself.

In the rigidly Catholic all-girls convent school in London that I attended as a teenager, few of our teachers, lay or religious, would have known a swear word if it had knocked on their door and presented its visiting card. But show any one of them an insult and within minutes they would be swapping deviled egg recipes and planning a walking holiday in Scotland together. We girls were called terrible things when we were at school. We were called the “s” word with abandon; we were told we had heads like sieves; we were called spineless willie-wets; we were called swell-headed ne’er-do-wells; we were called immoral; I was once called contemptible. We were called lazy if we happened not to be inspired by the subject any one of them was teaching; we were called conceited if we were foolish enough to let on that we were. We were called impertinent if we spoke our minds, lethargic if we remained silent. I once corrected the English teacher on a factoid about my favorite poet and was compared to Lucifer; a friend once proposed to the form mistress a minor administrative tweak and was compared to Hitler. We were collectively castigated by the alcoholic maths teacher for being “so boring, girls,” should one of us prove so pedestrian as to suggest to her after lunch that six plus eight might just total a sum that was other than seventeen.

Whoever invented the saying that begins with sticks and stones breaking bones had clearly not attended St. Angela’s Convent Grammar School in the 1960s, because there is not the shadow of a doubt that those words did hurt us. They were distressing to hear at the time, and would leave too many of us with a materially diminished sense of self-worth as we entered adulthood. I’m now wondering how different our lives might have been if just one of us teenagers of the time had been given the social permission to look any one of those women in the eye in the middle of a tirade and say, coldly and reprovingly, “You said a bad word.”

What if the ban on “stupid” were to grow and spread? Imagine – if I may be permitted briefly to channel my inner John Lennon – a world in which all insults were “bad words.” Imagine if all forms of derogatory and demeaning language were greeted with the reaction of Maria von Trapp exposed to the F-bomb. Imagine if all unkind names were not only names you did not call other people, but words you simply did not say.

You may say I’m a dreamer. But what if I and the five-year-olds were not the only ones? What if, as the kindergartners grew to voting citizenship, we all held onto and expanded the idea until we had created a society in which name-calling was plain old forbidden, not only in the schools, but in the workplace, in public spaces, and particularly – dare I suggest – in the political arena?

And if that were to come about, well – to quote another great songwriter who left us too soon – wouldn’t it be nice?

I shall try, from now on, to be like Lucas. I shall try to avoid all forms of name-calling, even in joke, so that ugly words like the “s” word and the “i” word and the “f-double-oh” word will at last grow withered from disuse and drop from my vocabulary. I shall try only, and at all times, to use words that are kind and respectful, and hope that if I can train my tongue out of using any others, my mind will at last lose the capacity to apply them too. I shall try to be part of the change. Because it is becoming blazingly apparent that something in the air does need to change, and if a way we can bring it about is by pruning our vocabulary, one unkind word at a time, then I say bring it on.

Maybe we can start by working on the words Mr. Los Angeles uses towards his wife when he is showing her how to access HBO Max on the television …