Let's talk about balls, want to?  It's a touchy subject, but we'll do it anyway, and if for no other reason as an example of a word that been ruined by slang.  Back when I was a young professor trying to make a point with students, I used the word balls and brought the house down.  We were discussing shapes and how people are drawn to certain objects, and I made the comment, "You know, man has always been fascinated with balls."  That did it because the laughter started right off, and I had no idea what I'd said to cause it.  I just stood there and looked stupid for a few moments (that's a piece of cake for me), then went on with the lecture.  I was referrng to sports, how often a ball of some kind is the object of the game, and they took it as a reference to testicles.  I related that story later that day in the faculty lounge and got the same reaction.  That's when I realized that a simple word like balls had lost a good part of its original meaning.

After that little emabrrassment, I started writing down the misusages of certain words, starting with balls.  After collecting a few, it was easy to see why the word suddenly turned to slang in many people's vocabulary.  And that's just a mild case of what happens to some words in our language.  You don't dare say the word pussy these days, not even when referring to a cat.  It just won't stand up, and we've therefore lost another word to slang . . . or worse.  I'm glad my name isn't Dick, but I'm sure glad that Cheney has it.  Fits him, right?  Sorry, just couldn't help getting in that one little jab at Big Dick.  

I taught for 30 years at the same university, and I always hated it when a new Vice President for Instruction came along.  Over that period of time, I had to deal with at least a dozen of them, and breaking in a new administrator is never easy.  The VP of Instruction, Provost, or whatever they call him, heads up the office where student lodge complaints . . . and when you live in a conservative area of the world and pepper your lectures with words like I used, you get complaints.  Before long I'd receive a request from the good dean to come to his office, where he'd counsel me on proper lecture language.  I always handled that the same way - listened, then went my way and did as I damn well pleased.  Thank God for academic freedom at the university level.

Then we got this tight-assed, ultra-conservative, Jesus freakie for an academic dean, and he decided to come down on me.  He even bragged it around that he was going to straighten me out, and when word got to me that I was on his hit list, I started giving him all the ammunition he'd need to call me in.  And . . . he did.  This dean wanted assurances from me that I'd stop talking nasty in class.  Most of the words he objected to were four letter words like damn, hell, crap, etc. - not really nasty words, just a bit off-color.  I listened, then read him a list of the words I promised to never use in class.  When I looked up at him after reading off my list of nasty words, his mouth was wide open and his eyes were the size of stop signs . . . and just as red.  Then he went nuts, started running around his office and flapping his arms like a goose trying to take off.  He made goose noises, too.

Later that day, the President of the university called me in and made a request - would I please stop baiting the dean?  He was sick of having him in his office doing the goose thing, and so I agreed to let up on him.  A month later, I presented a lecture to a group in which I said, "If fundamentalists are right about religion, then God is an asshole."  Then I made my case as to why fundamentalism is never good for us, especially in religion.  I presented a good case for religion where God could really be God . . . but the word asshole caused everything else to get lost.  The next day, the dean was in my office doing the goose thing again . . . and then in the President's office . . . and then he drafted a proposal to the Board of Regents to have me fired.  Since the board had just given me a special commendation for winning back to back national championships in the sport I coached on the side, that was destined to go nowhere.  The President fussed at me again, reminding me I had broken a promise to stop baiting the dean.  After that, I tried harder to stay out of trouble with words.

I retired the next year, which was just before George Bush ran for president.  Perhaps you rememer the incident, but a microphone picked up a comment he made to Cheney about some journalist being a "flaming asshole."  All of the religious fundamentalist in America, who were backing him big time, had to duck their heads on that one.  But I picked on my Republican friends, especially the right wing religious ones, by asking question like, "So . . . what about your boy calling some guy an asshole?"  Their response was that the word was justified if he used it because he was a Christian who'd been pushed to the point of using an improper word.  Du whut?  Did George actually make the word asshole acceptable?  For a moment there I found myself liking the guy, and then it dawned on me that what I was getting was just a bit of hypocracy and nothing more.

My point?  Let's face it folks, some slang is important in reaching the average person.  In a college classroom, where kids are more likely to go to sleep than listen, a well placed slang word can cause eyes to pop open and attention spans get better.  Saying something outrageous usually does that, I've noticed, and politicians are not ignorant of this.  Neither are movie makers, but the real point here is that there's a fine line here between what's just enough and what's too much.  Use a word that's over the top, or say something out of bounds, and you lose your audience.  Some words don't fit some situations, and there's nothing you can do to make them fit.  I made a lot of mistakes with words, and if I had it to do all over again, I'd probably do it another way.  What you write in books is one thing because a person can stop reading.  But a group of listeners?  Well, that takes a different approach.

That religious whacko dean back at the university got fired a few years after I retired.  I didn't like the guy but took no particular pleasure in his demise.  Maybe that's because I know deep down that he wasn't all wrong about me, and my experience with him taught me something valuable about words.  I was a good lecturer who knew his stuff about the subject at hand, but I sure could've done better.  If I had thought it through back then, maybe I would have concluded that sometimes it takes bigger balls to use the right word than the easy one.  You had to see that one coming, didn't you?

D. Paz, 9/24/07