Still, I just get this itchy feeling when we get so upset about particular verbiage. I will never say that words don’t matter and/or don’t hurt. Ever. But I worry more about INTENT than I do about whether or not the words have some particular meaning to ME. If someone’s being hateful or hurtful with words, that’s one thing, but if they are just using words that have multiple meanings, maybe we can let it go?

When someone says, “That’s retarded” don’t we all know that they mean that the statement seems to be coming from someone who isn’t mentally quite up to speed? Not the most sensitive statement in the world, but do we really need to get up in arms about it?

And when the teacher said he was mentally retarded, well, isn’t it true? What is the offense? Why all the issues about being blind (instead of sight impaired), deaf (instead of hearing impaired, and handicapped (instead of disabled or differently abled, or the cloying handi-capable)?

Once I explained a nonsensical statement by saying, “Sorry. I’m brain dead,” only to have a woman scream at me about how hurtful it was because she really had a relative in a vegetative state. Huh? My mom is brain dead, too — she’s actually dead — but I don’t take the statement personally.

I’m just going to jump in here and say that feelings of anger are normal, and if we tell our kids that they are ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, or ‘evil’ for feeling them, we’re going to land them in therapy.

I’m going to go out on a limb and seem even less enlightened than I’m sure I already do, but here goes.

I don’t necessarily think that feeling angry is bad, wrong, or evil. But there ARE things that I do think are bad, wrong, and evil. And if my kids are doing them, I honestly don’t see the point of pretending the behaviors are better than they are or using some kind of dumbed down verbiage.

Let’s say your kid steals from a store. Do you really refrain from saying that stealing is bad? “The child isn’t bad, the behavior is bad.” is just goofy psycho-babble to me. We are what we do and when we do bad things, we ARE being bad.

If you ask me, all the semantics are sending way more people into therapy than just a straightforward, loving discussion about what’s right and what’s wrong.

Back to my usual lurk mode.