![]() As seen in words like drivel and palaver, spit is never far from the bullshit lexicon. Its 1986 use in John Hockey's Squaddies: Portrait of a Subculture is characteristic, as the author describes a sergeant who "was a regular gobshite always shouting at you in barracks."Īnother sense of gob may have influenced this word: It's been a verb meaning spitting and a noun for a wad of spit. By the mid-20th century it can be found referring to a fool, then a fool with a big mouth. This mostly Irish word first turns up as a term for a seaman in the U.S. Then you could tell your friend to make up for the insult by buying you nachos.Įven if you elude Big Brother, there's no escape from Big Bullshit. If a friend said, "I heard you hate nachos," you could reply, "Applesauce!" as a firm denial. The word can also be used a simple dismissal of something. Often it means lies or flattery, as in this example from Ring Lardner Jr.'s The Love Nest and Other Stories: "I wasn't born yesterday and I know apple sauce when I hear it, and I bet you've told that to 50 girls." Or maybe applesauce tasted like pure crap to someone, because this has been a synonym for nonsense since at least the 1920s. Maybe this term was influenced by horse apples, a euphemism for horseshit. Horseshit and rubbish aren't highly valued, to say the least.īut applesauce? That origin isn't so clear. It's obvious why some words become synonyms for bullshit. Here, in an excerpt from his new book, Bullshit: A Lexicon (Three Rivers Press), Peters shares five colorful phrases to add to your vocabulary. -Jill Krasny Applesauce Fortunately, Mark Peters, card-carrying member of the American Dialect Society who happens to write the Best Joke Ever column for McSweeney's, has your number. You need something forceful. Hilarious. Eloquent. You know the deal: You're sitting at work, bored out of your skull, and BS is no longer cutting it. And will hopefully think before they open their mouth to utter "that's retarded" the next time.īut if you want to throw around the word "retard," go ahead, but don't be surprised if you're taken to task for it.Sometimes you've gotta call a spade a stinking pile of horseshit. "If you're lucky…" really hits me, because that's what I know: anyone who gets to meet my son is going to be lucky indeed. "What happens is if you're lucky, you come to understand that those words describe actual human beings." It kills me that my kid is going to grow up in a world that considers him just to be a retard - to diminish his inherent awesomeness - because that's all the world that thinks retarded=BAD is going to know of him.Īnd I like this quote from the NPR piece: ![]() When's the last time - not counting the Tropic Thunder bullshit - anyone saw a disabled person as anything other than the butt of a joke or an offhanded comment in the mainstream media? I bet no one can name more than one or two instances, if that. Times have changed for the better, the words that once were slurs have been taken back by their own constituency (much like "nigger"), and so the complaints of people offended by "retard/retarded" are easily dismissed, even though their world hasn't changed. But the rub is that, as the parent of a child with a disability, about the only time I hear any reference is made to a person like my son, it's because something is called "retarded." And damn if that doesn't wear on you after a while.ĭan's lucky enough in this day and age that there are gay people everywhere - every stripe, every creed, every type of gay person you can imagine in the media, in the alt weeklies, at the pulpit, in Congress - and so throwing around "faggot" or "queer" (or "pansy-assed" even) doesn't raise the ire it once may have. Which is the same thing that happens with "the R word" for me…and I guess "the F word" for Dan. ![]() ![]() I agree with Dan, by the way, in that using "the R word" for "retard" is just as ridiculous as saying "the F word" for "faggot." Louis CK had a piece in his last stand-up DVD about how using "the N word" as a euphemism is actually worse, because everybody knows what it means and your brain automatically cries out "nigger." You can see the clip here: As someone who's taken the Merc to task here and there about their use of retard/retarded as an all-encompassing adjective to describe something stupid or dumb, I get tired of trying to make the same argument over and over again, but I guess that's what it takes.
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