Which words are bad words?

The following is a conversation that my daughter recently had with her four-year-old son.
Jacob: “Mom is @#$% a bad word?”
Beth as she’s spitting out her coffee: “Yes, it is.”
Jacob: “OK.”
Beth: “How do you know about that word?”
Jacob: “Because I have a brain and I’m smart..”
I think the word in question is more vulgar than bad, but it was one of the late comedian George Carlin’s famous seven dirty words therefore it more than qualifies as an official bad word.
I find it interesting that certain words are classified as bad while others aren’t. It isn’t the sound of the word itself that we find objectionable as words that rhyme with bad words are perfectly acceptable in polite conversation.
Words that are classified as bad in some instances are perfectly acceptable in others. The language we use at work is different than the language we use with friends. The words we choose to say in front of our children aren’t always that same ones we say when they are asleep.
Most objectionable language consists of words that convey anger or irritation and are intended to convey that the person, action or thing in question is less than perfect. They are words that not only grate on the ears, they grate on the conscience.
As adults, we want to preserve the innocence of our children. We want to protect them from the ugliness of language that is less than clean. That is why I cringed when there was an altercation across the street several weeks ago in the middle of the night. The bad words and phrases were clearly audible in the night air. The rental two houses down is home to young children and I hoped that they were fast asleep and blissfully unaware of what was going on. Thankfully, the neighbors seem to have come to some sort of detente and the ruckus hasn’t been repeated.
There are many words in use today that I find objectionable that others do not. It wasn’t so long ago that the word I hear most often from kids walking home from school was never uttered, not even by the most foul mouthed among us. Now, it is used as every part of speech, and if not in every sentence, then at least once a paragraph.
But the words I dislike most are those used to discriminate. Terms that lump entire classes of people into one.
Stupid, moron, incompetent; those are words I dislike. Racial slurs bother me more than the word Jacob said.
I have used many bad words in my life but I can’t recall even one instance where I used them to refer to an entire class of people. It just doesn’t occur to me to do that.
I want to take a short detour here and tell you a story. I had three uncles. They grew up in Dayton, Ohio. As teenagers, they didn’t want to go to church with their parents. So their dad, my beloved grandfather, told them they didn’t have to but they did have to go to church somewhere. So they visited Polish churches, German churches, any church where English wasn’t spoken. This was acceptable to all involved.
Unbeknownst to them, they were learning tolerance.
In spite of the language of younger people being less clean than I would prefer, I think that their generation is going to be far more tolerant of differences in people than my mom’s generation was.
If that leads to a dearth of bad words used to describe ethnic groups, then so be it.
It has been said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
If that is so, then vulgar language is in the ear of the listener.
And the conversation with Jacob shows that little ears often pick up on words we would rather they not hear.

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