Words Even Punk Bands Should Avoid

It's not news that three members of a Russian punk band were sentenced to two years in prison for expressing their political opinions in an obnoxious way...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/pussy-riot-guilty-of-hooliganism-russian-judge-finds/2012/08/17/9adc8720-e865-11e1-936a-b801f1abab19_blog.html?wprss=rss_world

A quick web search for the story shows that global protests on behalf of the musicians' freedom of speech are already underway. (The following link is included because it floated to the top of the web search. Without passing judgment on the punkers' act, I'll take this opportunity to remind everyone that Amnesty International is a legitimate charity...which has been known to defend some people whom this web site wouldn't try to defend.)

http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=6oJCLQPAJiJUG&b=6645049&aid=517749&msource=WPSBTL7749&cid=psbtl7749

However, the purpose of this article was to discuss the mysterious processes by which some perfectly good English words acquire meanings that can be said to make them obnoxious.

Like the name of the controversial band. In the nineteenth century, nobody was offended by mentioning pussycats, or pussy-willows, or puss moths, or even by using "Pussy" as a pet name for a little girl. When Robert E. Lee dismissed "Puseyism," a controversial school of theological thought, as "pussyism," nobody thought his language was inappropriate for use in church. The term implied softness, furriness, kittenish-ness, possibly weakness. Only in the twentieth century did Americans start using it as a substitute for another word, which had been considered so unprintable for so long that it's become unfamiliar, even amusingly archaic.

By now, in my part of the world, it's hardly even safe to say "pussycat." Those who want to be cute might describe the current residents of the Cat Sanctuary as lady cats, or Candice as the mommy cat and Grayzel as the granny cat. Breeders would call Candice a queen. (Grayzel, a sweet and quiet cat who let her sisters be Queen first but thinks she outranks her niece, would disagree.) Most Americans just use "cat" when they don't want to specify a male or "tomcat." In my part of the world, "cat" might not even be heard by someone overreacting to a word that's been used to mean a part of the human body.

In the United States we uphold the right of musicians, even non-punk musicians, to express political dissent during their performances...but I doubt that anyone would think a band had any right to use the name these Russian women chose for themselves.

Oddly, in the United States "hen," "mare," "cow," "ewe," or even "sow" don't generate as much hostility as the equivalent terms for canines and felines do. In other corners of the barnyard, the words for male equines, bovines, and chickens are also considered obnoxious.

Then there's the legitimate word for what vacuum cleaners and infants do. I thought about this recently when tempted to buy a letter to the Kingsport Times-News for this web site. An earlier letter to the editor had compared Presidents Obama and Hoover. The letter that amused me suggested that that writer must have confused President Hoover with the Hoover vacuum cleaner, because the machine and the current administration both...but we can't use that joke here. A Hoover vacuum cleaner sucks up dust and dirt, and a tax-and-spend administration sucks up money and resources and private initiative. And if you want to use the word "suck" in the modern U.S.A., you have to specify an object; otherwise an obscene reference is likely to be inferred.

Then there's "honey." Every generally understood word for any kind of sweet food has, at some time or other, been used as a pet name. Using any pet name, including the traditional ones like "darling," to address people whose names you don't know has always been considered boorish. However, "honey" has some extra baggage that, so far as I know at the time of writing, similar endearments like "cookie" don't have. Honey literally refers to a substance secreted by bees, so in slang it's used to refer to other body secretions; it's definitely a more obnoxious word than "manure." Some Americans continue to use "Honey" as a pet name or even as a legal name they give their children, but groups of women have sued employers for allowing supervisors to address subordinate staff as "honey."

Sometimes the offensive interpretation of a word is based on ignorance. A daam or dam is a low-value coin; the word and the coin became obsolete when the cost of producing the coin exceeded its value. "Not worth a dam" and "don't give a dam" then became legitimate ways to express the idea that something had no value. Though inexact, since a dime still has some value, "dime" would be a more appropriate equivalent to "dam" than the profane word usually mistaken for daam in the United States. Thus the line Clark Gable uttered in the movie Gone with the Wind offended only people who didn't know what a dam was (a group that apparently included Margaret Mitchell). It fitted into the story, though; earlier in the book Rhett Butler uttered an blasphemous curse upon Scarlett O'Hara.

Sometimes the offensive interpretation of a word is easy to overlook. It makes sense to describe a bossy, bullying, or manipulative person as a jerk because s/he jerks people or their plans around. Few people who hadn't seen it in the dictionary would guess that the earliest slang use of "jerk" described a person who was repulsive in a more general and offensive way. For me a sentence like "Rahm Emanuel is a jerk" might be debatable, but it's not obscene. Some people disagree. Since I want people old enough to be my grandparents, as well as people young enough to be my grandchildren, to enjoy this web site, I try to avoid words like "jerk" too.

It's impossible for anyone ever to list all the words that are still found in basic English dictionaries, with legitimate meanings, but offend some English-speaking people. All this post can do is try to give our Russian, Indian, European, and other international readers some idea of the kind of thing they need to look out for. There is no official Academy to regulate the approved ways English words can be used, and declare innovative word uses "not English," as there are for French, Spanish, or Arabic. Even native speakers of English are well advised to check our words for "hidden baggage" before addressing fellow English-speakers from a different region or generation.