Okay, so…swearing

Let’s take a few minutes to think about swearing.  We have been TOLD, that it’s not lady like to swear, or use “bad language.”  We have been told, that if we have to resort to such childish things as name calling, or swearing, we won’t be taken seriously, and we will be seen as “uneducated,” and verbally poverty stricken.

What they didn’t tell us is that swearing can get a point across.  It can show anger, strength and a sense of fearlessness, as well as the ability to not give a flying fuck what the rules  actually are for WOMEN ONLY.

Being lady like is killing us, in case you haven’t noticed.  It’s kept us poor, violated, silent and in our place.  I mean why do women believe they SHOULD be proper and never swear?  They were TAUGHT to be that way by a culture run by men, who want women to be docile and easy to control.

People frown upon uppity women.  Crass women, vulgar women and well, just pick any negative adjective you like, that will keep us quiet and uphold the status quo.  That’s what those negative adjectives are for…keeping us quiet, keeping men in power, keeping the status quo in place.

Men are not labeled for swearing.  They are not punished, frowned upon, or considered uneducated, if they swear now and then.

Women are judged for everything they do.  Therefore, we may as well do as we please.  We are dismissed and ignored no matter how we act, so have fun and say whatever you like.

Some men are horrified when women swear, because that’s not what women are supposed to/or expected to do.  What exactly ARE we supposed to do?  Sit quietly, while we are hunted, and smile when we’re caught, afraid to say a bad word for fear of being called uncouth?

Women are not expected to say anything offensive.  There’s that word offensive.  Women are NEVER allowed to be offensive, and men define what “offensive,” means for WOMEN.  They can kill us and get away with it, but we can’t say fuck, or they are horrified by our behavior.  Men can take away our right to have an abortion, they can TAKE ANYTHING THEY LIKE FROM US, but we shouldn’t say anything they find offensive!  That is MALE CONTROL AND OWNERSHIP OF WORDS AND WHO USES THEM AND HOW.  We are not allowed to be OFFENDED by anything men do.

See, that’s a double standard.  That’s keeping women in their place, so they can be up there on the rickety pedestal where virgins stand and press their lips together, so they don’t say the wrong thing, no matter what the men say or do to them.  And guess what…WOMEN remain silent because they BELIEVE they will be offensive, crude and vulgar.  That’s how it works.  WE police ourselves and keep OURSELVES in line.  They…don’t have to do anything, other than frown, or give us a disgusted look, when we say something they don’t like.  And they can punish us in all kinds of ways.  Punish us by rejecting us, ignoring us, tut tutting us, talking about us, or beating us.

Swearing is not polite.  And women are always expected to be polite. It’s not womanly to be crude, vulgar or offensive, even if men have 10,000 ugly words for every part of our bodies.  They have the FREEDOM of speech.  We do not.  Just one more thing that’s kept from females.  WORDS do not belong to us.  It’s risky to “shoot off our mouths,”  to say what we think, to use the SAME WORDS that men use.  Just one more thing that men own and we don’t.

Think about it.  Words, expressions are important.  That’s why they keep them for themselves.  The orange one and the current republicans say terrible things about women.  Imagine if a woman attacked a “fat, short, ugly, disgusting looking man with skinny ankles.”  Hmmm.  Think any MAN would be upset about THAT?

Women rarely think about how language is turned against women.  Used against them, kept from them.  Women had to use male names to get published, because the power of words belong to men alone.

This is not even close to what language does to us.  It ERASES us.  By PRETENDING that saying he, or man, INCLUDES women is a lie.  It does NOT.  It eliminates us.  It makes us invisible.  Would a man feel included if we used SHE instead?  PEACE ON EARTH GOODWILL TO WOMEN?????  Well, women includes men, it’s even in the word…wo man.  They shouldn’t complain at all.

We have been conditioned to believe what they tell us to believe.  We are punished in all kinds of ways, if WE don’t behave.  Words are for all of us and it’s time we take them back.  WE should decide what’s offensive and what’s not.  Like a president who gets to stand in front of the nation and talk about grabbing pussy.  How can THAT not be offensive to everyone in the world.  Men get away with everything, and everything they do shows how they control the lives of women.  But women grabbed the word and started wearing hats with little cat ears, and t-shirts, making women’s groups of pussy power.  That’s taking back the language and defining words in a positive way, that works for women.  Because men use words to attack and control us.

Sometimes it takes a little practice for some women to start swearing.  It’s so frowned upon by society.  But words are simply words, and a lot of them, have been kept from us.  It’s just brainwashing.  But even we are offended by ourselves, which shows just how deep the conditioning goes.  Telling ourselves that it’s improper, or ugly, or whatever, is just what we have been taught to believe, and by doing so, the power of words ends up being just for them.

Women have been rescuing other words from male control.  Take bitch, for example.  A lot of women are proud to be called a bitch, and feel it means standing up for oneself, being strong and powerful.  They have taken another word that men used to attack women, and embraced it, changing its definition so that it works for all females.

There aren’t a lot of ugly words for men, because we have not been allowed to use the language for ourselves.

Swearing isn’t for everyone.   But being told you shouldn’t, or can’t…because you’re a female, well…that just pisses me off.

 

 

Photo:  vlad Chetan
Pexels

 

 

I wonder if anyone can understand what’s being said? Foreign languages aren’t easy to learn.

Photo:  Sam Barber
Unsplash

Language…oh, yeah

I think it’s time we get serious about the elephant in the room.  Language.  No matter how we look at it, no one REALLY knows where it came from.

The first beings that were kind of like us, didn’t have the physical equipment to be able to speak.  Another group, who were around at the same time, were more well endowed, as far as vocal cords and all that stuff went. But does anyone think that one of them picked up a twig and said, “STICK,”  then suddenly, that word was passed down to every generation thereafter, like monkeys using tools to get insects out of a log with a stick?  Or, do you think they sounded like they were speaking ig pay attenlay, otherwise known as pig latin?

See that’s the thing with this whole language mess.  Who made it up?  Where did it come from?  I love it when someone says, “It’s from the Latin word apple.”  Excuse me?  Where did Latin come from, and who, or WHAT, decided what to name EVERYTHING and invent verbs?

I think it’s impossible to find the beginning of language.  Did a man walk into a cave, take one look at the wall and say, “Nice hand and antelope drawings now what’s for dinner?”  I don’t THINK so.

Did Latin just spring up from an old toga?  Nope.  Languages have lots of words.  How did any of them get to mean what they mean?  Who or what, made it all up.

And..let’s not forget that it’s HARD TO LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE.  So, how did they all simply appear, or did the aliens really do it when we started getting cozy with each other and wanted to overthrow them for abuses in labor laws?

There is no logical way to get to the BEGINNING.  Just like the Big Bang that never happened.  When we don’t know something we pretend that we do, or make up a theory and then everyone says, “OMG finally, we can stop trying to find out what really happened and just tell everyone a story that they’ll believe, because humans aren’t all that bright, and we need more grant money.”

How did language happen?  Don’t let anyone tell you how the cave people sounded, or what they talked about on a rainy day.  NO ONE KNOWS.  Remember what they said about dinosaurs skin, until they found out some of them had FEATHERS?  Hard to believe anything we’re told, isn’t it? Look what happened to Pluto.

Do you know that there are words and sounds that you CANNOT pronounce if you didn’t learn how to do it as a wee tot?  That’s true.  So again, who made that up and where did it all start? I don’t believe that Latin was invented anymore than any other language.

I think language was given to us.  Then our memories were erased, not that we’d notice if that happened right now.  We really aren’t that bright…we’re just good at fantasizing.   We don’t know where all the words came from.  And why isn’t there just one language?  Again, the aliens did it to us, but let’s just say they didn’t.  How many words do we really need for STICK?

I don’t think we’ll ever know the truth.  The early people with the more advanced throat things, killed and absorbed the group who could only grunt.  It is possible the less well endowed group couldn’t argue their case, but I think, it was just one of the first power plays to take place between our cousins.   “Hey, look these guys can’t talk, let’s kill them and take the women.”

I don’t look things up on Google very often, since the answers all come from other human beings, and who can trust any of them?  Big Bang, feathered dinosaurs…I mean come on, something is weird in the language department.  There is no way to explain it.  I mean do you think a bunch of guys sat down, after inventing the wheel and fire, and started making up Latin?  Yeah, I don’t think so either.  I think they did a lot of pointing and grunting, just like a lot of guys still do today.

And you know males had a hand in it, since the language is so bloody sexist.  If aliens were involved, I’m thinking the alien males aren’t much better than the human ones.  And I bet the aliens don’t know where their language came from either.

There’s a lot more to this than meets the word, believe me.  I mean stone tablets?  We were trying to communicate from the beginning, but you don’t just develop a language when you don’t have paper, or do you?  Don’t you need a LANGUAGE in order to write?  Duh.  If you didn’t have words, how could you leave a note?  So where did it all come from?  And yes, oral stories have been handed down from generation to generation, no paper or stone tablets needed, but the stories were told in WORDS.  Where did the words and meanings come from.  Where did the descriptive words fit in?  How did it all begin?

 

Okay, so…

Why don’t we ever add a new letter to our alphabet?  Yes, yes, it would be confusing at first, but maybe we could only use the new letter in new words. That way all of our other words wouldn’t get stressed out, or worried.  Letters seem nice enough.  I’m sure they would agree that there’s room for at least one more of them.

We would have to change keyboards, of course, and some purists would rant and rave, stomp their feet and bemoan the fact that we are destroying the English language with all the slang we use, let alone a new letter addition.  But they have complained before and yet they keep adding new words to the dictionaries.  I realize it must be hard for them, but changes do occur in pretty much everything.

Maybe we could just add a new punctuation mark.  A lightening bolt, for example, meaning, READ THIS NOW…THIS IS IMPORTANT…DON’T LOOK AWAY.  I think that’s a good idea, since it’s more impressive than any of the symbols we currently use, including exclamation marks, and it would add more color to our text, even if we wouldn’t say it out loud.  We rarely say our punctuation marks out loud.  Hardly ever.  Mostly not.  It would seem weird to say, comma, or hyphen, or any of the others, as we spoke.  Now that, would be confusing.

A lightening bolt is a strong and powerful symbol.  Far more impressive than a colon, even if they would have very different, but important jobs.  People don’t really like colons and semi-colons all that much, but I think they would love lightening bolts.

It’s just something to think about, that’s all.

Top photo:  Héctor J. Rivas
Unsplash

Lightening bolt:  Pixabay

 

Language…

people don’t say
GOODBYE
anymore
they say
BE CAREFUL
STAY SAFE
the virus
is changing our language

 

Picture: Pixabay

Okay, so…language

The cat actually has absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter. I just love cats and thought this one was cute.

Don’t you think it’s weird when someone tells you that the word they are using comes from a Latin, or Greek word, meaning the same thing?  I think it is.  My question, of course, is where did the Latin or Greek word come from?  Cave people stared the whole thing so maybe all language began with meaningful grunts, then progressed to one or two grunts together, until they got to words.

People made up Latin and Greek.  The poor cave people didn’t have anywhere to go to get their words.  They literally had to start from, scratch, so to speak.  Well, they couldn’t speak, not in the beginning, anyway.  Physically impossible.  There is a debate about all of that, since some believe more than one kind of cave person was living at the same time and one group could actually communicate better than the other, so they won.  Either way, no one probably sounded like us.   I don’t know what they called a tree, but I imagine a lot of pointing was done when they began.  I could be wrong.

So, who started writing Latin, or anything else?  What are Latin’s roots?  I doubt the Latin Quarter in Paris had anything to do with it (snicker, snicker).  I just want to know when the first Roman stood up and started speaking in sentences.  What did people say BEFORE someone decided to make Latin up?   That’s a real question.  What came before all the languages and how did they turn out the way they did?

There’s always Pig Latin, or ig pay atten lay.  But that’s just the bastardization of something pigs say.

Who made up languages?  Some guy sitting on a fallen log, writing in the sand with a stick, naming things?  It just seems weird to me.  Language wasn’t and then it was.  Our past is something entirely different than what we believe it to be, since there are no eye witnesses.  People digging around thousands of years later are telling us what they think, but realistically, they only know a few things and extrapolate from there.  In other words, more guess work.

So, we have a lot of words in different languages, that mean the same thing.  But if you don’t speak the other person’s language, everyone becomes a cave person, pointing, watching body language, facial expressions, or looking things up on their phones (cave people couldn’t do that, in case you’re wondering).

We seem to take a lot for granted.  Everything, in fact.  The farther we get from nature, the more we get lost in other ways of living.  Not may people seem to care about how cave people communicated or how language began, or how some people used hieroglyphs,  while others made up something else, and all the rest.  Latin is considered a Dead Language.  Too difficult, complicated, not enough speakers left, or all of the above.  Whatever the cave people said, or grunted was not written down.  They were artists and just drew on the walls of their caves in glorious works that show all of us that creativity and beauty are something we’re born with…something that naturally lives inside of us.  Think about how our culture tries to kill that and make us all the same.  Cave drawings were the graffiti of its day.  No one thought it was defacing property.

Anyway, that’s just what I was thinking about this morning.