Let’s talk about words, shall we? Last week, as I walked to my 9 A.M. class, a fellow student walked in a building a few steps ahead of me, then turned to hold the door for me. I shot a quick smile and reached for the door and turned around and held it out for the gentleman behind me. He said, “Thank you.” I said nothing, but a thought occurred to me, or several thoughts rather. Why did he feel a need to thank me, but I had no such impulse? Why did I then feel ashamed for not expressing gratitude only after being thanked?

I think it’s mostly a simple answer: words are weird. Words form our language, the English language, our primary method of communication. We spend years learning the words. The right words, the wrong words. The good and bad words. Synonyms, homonyms, homophones, roots, suffixes, prefixes. Words have different meanings for different people. Maybe you have favorite words, words that are fun to say or words that are awkward to use in front of your grandmother. There are words that are obviously from other languages, like quesadilla or Albuquerque, and words you might not have known were French originally, like beef or Baton Rouge. (Okay, you may have known that one.) We have words for politeness—please and thank you—and words for rudeness—keep reading, douche nozzle.

But when you break it down, what do these words actually mean? They’re just words. Without the denotations and connotations they’ve been assigned, they’re just arbitrary series of sounds. But I’m not here to take down the entire English language, so why don’t we break this up a bit?

Pennywise The Dancing Clown

First things first. What is this mysterious “it” that keeps coming up in conversation?

“It sure is toasty outside today. Wouldn’t you say, Alice?”

“Yes, it is, Frank, but I hear it’s supposed to rain this afternoon.”

What’s toasty? The air? The weather? Then what’s supposed to rain? The air doesn’t rain. The weather can’t do that either. Is the sky raining? Not technically, but it would make sense, except the sky isn’t hot or cold; it really isn’t even a tangible object of which to test the temperature. I don’t know, man, it’s pretty fishy to me.

Words of Rudeness

“Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.” George Carlin’s infamous seven dirty words you can't say on TV. Though he was one of the greatest funnymen of the past century, Carlin was also a thinking man, and his timeless bit has sparked more of these types of questions for me.

Why are these words so dirty? They refer to some pretty lewd topics, but “feces,” “urine,” “penetrate,” “vulva,” “fellator,” and “Oedipus” are all acceptable for television (and maybe even grandma’s house). Although the denotations are the same, the connotations take control, leading us to reserve some words for the dinner table and others for the pub crawl. These “dirty” words aren’t inherently bad; we’ve just given them a bad name, so to speak. We use words in a negative sense so often that they become associated with these negative thoughts. They’re all just words, though.

I stand firmly in the camp of weakening our censorship. We should all be able to use the words we want to use. Why is it so bad if someone expresses their frustration with a few choice expletives? I say, as long as the intention is not to insult someone or a group of someones, then by all means, pepper in an occasional F-bomb. After all, I don’t want to live in a civilization where calling someone a butt-faced turd muncher is more acceptable than yelling, “Shit,” when you stub your toe.

Words of Politeness

This is where I really get controversial. Ahem. Piss on “please” and “thank you.” Like I’ve said before, they’re just words, but in this case, they don’t really mean anything. Define “please.” Go on. Give it a try. It’s hard. I know. Did you come up with anything? You see the common phrases we hear daily when practicing “good manners” have become abstract ideas that mean nothing aside from pleasantry. I bet you could define “thank,” but when the “you” gets thrown in, it’s an abstract phrase again. What does “thank you” mean? Or what about its response, “You’re welcome?” That one’s a doozy. Here’s a fun game. Next time someone says “you’re welcome,” say, “To what?” They will be right confused, so ask them to clarify: “You said I’m welcome. Welcome to what, exactly?” This is quite a gag at family gatherings and block parties, I swear.

We blindly recite phrases like these every day. Why? Because our parents, our guardians, our teachers, our nearby adults taught us to say them. A child asks for a cookie. His mother replies, “What do you say?” The child gives the response he has been conditioned to give and receives his snack. “And now what do you say?” the mother adds. The better question would be, “And why do we say that?”

Now, I may seem like a bad, little English major for bashing the importance of words, but being a creative writing major has taught me to use context rather than stating directly. A common mantra for writers is “Show don’t tell.” Don’t say a character ran quickly. A reader should be able to tell how your character ran by the situation he or she is in or by the tension you’ve shown or the suspense you’ve built. So in a way, I’m a good, little English major. We don’t need words to show gratitude. We can show appreciation through action, through expression.

I understand some people like to use the words, and I can respect that, but I am not one of them. Feel free to drop a comment if you disagree, but leave me out of the malarkey of this language. I’m going to grandma’s house. You can leave your “please” and “thank you” at the door. Have a nice day.