As a good Latter-day Saint I am supposed to be seeking after things that are praiseworthy, lovely, and of good report. Sometimes I worry that my language is too coarse and vulgar. Now I enjoy a good hell and damn and I must confess that @$$ is one of my very favorite words. If it were up to me I’d use that word a lot. Alas I am living amongst some tiny people who think that stupid is a bad word. <\/p>\n
A favorite activity of these little ones is to listen carefully to everyone’s language and pounce upon any offenders. It seems I can’t get through one day with out hearing, “Mom, he said a bad word!” No one is safe from these accusations. Not me, not Geoff, and especially not my son who seems to take the majority of the language police beatings.<\/p>\n
So I try to keep it clean. One word I have a particularly difficult time with is the word crap. I say it…a lot. It’s a bit controversial. I know good Latter-day Saints who use the word prolifically and I know good Latter-day Saints who twitch at its utterance.<\/p>\n
Well, my friends, I’ve decided to change my evil ways. I’ve often thought about ways to replace this word in my vocabulary and now serendipity has provided a way for me to do so. Let me tell you how:<\/p>\n
The other day Geoff and I found ourselves in the pediatrics ward of our local hospital. It turned out that our darling baby had contracted a case of double pneumonia with what the doctors think is RSV (the tests are still out on that one). After spending the day in a tiny hospital room with a very crabby child who howled at the mere thought of any sort of medical procedure being done I was ready to go home. <\/p>\n
Geoff came to the hospital as soon as he had the other children settled with loving ward members. He hates hospitals and as soon as he steps foot into one he starts asking anyone official looking when he can leave. My joke for him is that when he is 95 years old I’m going to find him walking down the side of the road pushing an iv stand with his wrinkley booty poking out the back of his hospital gown. <\/p>\n
After a few hours of the baby looking and acting considerably better we eventually got the word that we were free to go. We had a lovely British nurse discharging us from the hospital and I was enjoying listening to her accent. She was talking to my baby who was pretty fussy and the nurse said to her, “I know baby, this is rubbish really.” I thought to myself, the British sure use the word rubbish a lot.<\/p>\n
When she left the room for a minute I said to Geoff, “The British sure use the word rubbish a lot.”<\/p>\n
To which he replied, “Kind of like Americans use the word crap a lot.”<\/p>\n
I thought to myself, hhhmmm, very interesting. And yet rubbish sounds a lot less vulgar to me. Then I thought, maybe I should use the word rubbish (you must admit it’s a cool word) in place of crap! The only thing that concerns me about using that word is my lack of knowledge in the British slang department. Rubbish means trash, right? <\/p>\n
It’s the New Year which means it’s time to clean up my act. I’m starting with flushing the pooh and bringing in the trash.
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