If Batting Around Words, Look Out for Hardballs

My 6-year-old daughter has begun asking me about words, words that are different from the routine blather of everyday, dangerous words, words that she sometimes hears on TV, grown-up words. These words are bad.

My daughter singles out these words with a letter. “The S-word,” she said in reporting the linguistic infraction of a boy on the school playground the other day. “He said the S-word.”

Then she used it in a sentence, to make sure that I understood. “He said, ‘That S-word!’ ”

But I still didn’t understand, so I asked my daughter for clarification and with trepidation, she obliged. (She fears my knitted eyebrows and a frown, which is known around the house as my look.)

“Hm,” I said then. I was not wearing my look, seeing as how I had been thinking of another, more socially unacceptable S-word, one that has been known to escape my own mouth at times. This word was comparatively mild, but nonetheless crude.

“He shouldn’t say that,” I said. “That’s not nice.” I sounded prim.

Then I let it drop.

Except later on my daughter wanted to know was there more than one S-word, Mommy, and how come the boy on the playground says that the S-word is not bad in his house, and what does it really mean anyway?

We haven’t gotten to the other letters of the alphabet yet.

Batting around words, of course, is how I manage to live. I tap them into my computer, they appear in the newspaper and I get paid. If I write a word that is socially unacceptable, the computer lets me know. “Object” is the computer code.

Not all of these words are obscene. Some are part of the bigot’s lexicon, or at the very least they suggest that she who uses them hasn’t gotten the message yet. In the old days, that message was brought home to schoolchildren with a mouthful of soap.

Today it just gives movies a rating of PG.

But bad words, like all words, change. My computer doesn’t object to hell or damn anymore, although this might not be something that I’d want the 6-year-old to know just yet.

These, I would tell her, fall into the category of “not very nice,” something that we don’t say in our family, thank you very much. (Or at least not when the kids can hear.)

These days, adults call this semantic gray zone something else. Part of this zone includes the “not politically correct.” Draw up a list of these words and you’ve got a road map to the hot-button issues of our time.

Take this test. How do you describe the waitress who served you lunch, or the secretary who typed your report, or the nurse who just took your pulse? Is she a woman or a girl?

What about the neighbors whose lives revolve around their church? Are they fundamentalist Christians, evangelical Christians, conservative Christians or not what you’d call Christians at all?

And then there’s race. African-American or black? Asian or Oriental? Latino or Hispanic? White or Anglo? The list, of course, goes on. Americans describe themselves and each other with hyphens a lot.

The message here is that words do count. They may not break bones, but they can commandeer the spirit or control the mind. Meaning comes in shades of adjectives and verbs. Implication, whether accidental or contrived, often overrules anything that a dictionary might decree.

In other words, we know what someone said , but we bet that their meaning is something else.

Which is why words get us into trouble so much. Many times we guess wrong.

And the bad words, the not-so-nice words, the dangerously provocative words, change their meaning especially fast. A person can be labeled a bigot, a clod, or an ignoramus simply for falling behind the learning curve. And that’ s not very nice.

No, I’m not talking about the obvious exceptions to all this, the people who cry “PC!” like that boy who cried “Wolf!” Think of the local politician who said he didn’t know that “faggot” was derogatory to gays, or the state assemblyman who recently distributed a racist poem about illegal immigrants, or the Andrew Dice Clay (remember him?) brand of humor that sounds, and feels, like an assault.

Political correctness run amok? Yeah, right .

This is not to say, however, that we should rush in and ban everything to which we take offense. Was Mark Twain’s writing racist? Some have suggested just that, and they want it out of the schools.

And I take offense at that. Was Twain a racist? Talk about that in school, but read the words first.

So back to this S-word business. The word, you may have guessed, was suck. The sentence I would have used for clarification when I was growing up would have involved a baby and a thumb. And, no, my computer never has objected to suck as a verb.

But, then again, my computer does not have a brain. Context eludes it. Its language has no nuance or tone.

Our language, however, is forever in flux. We need to talk about its meaning, chew it over, savor it, or spit it out. But first we have to understand what it means.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.