21st Century Euphemisms: A Guide for the Verbally Challenged

Chuckle #383 | November 18, 2009
 scroll down to leave a comment

Ever been embarrassed because you THOUGHT you were having a pleasant conversation about FALL BULBS, but it turns out that everyone else was talking about “S” “E” “X”? Join the club. For those of us who don't subconciously channel William Safire, language can be obtuse. There are hidden meanings everywhere you look…music, the arts, sports, even preschool. Anything you say can be misinterpreted. Watch your words or you might find yourself facing a room full of people that you've unwittingly SHOCKED into silence. And it doesn't take much these days to get yourself blackballed by the grannies who control entree into the garden club.

Like whatever happened to the word “STICK”? As far as I can tell, any phrase that includes the word “STICK” must be viewed as a possible euphemism for You Know What. The “WHAT” being something I won’t refer to euphemistically because using any of the “euphemisms” I know would be far worse than simply calling this particular anatomical spade, A SPADE. Lost? Read on.

For example, a friend just informed me that a “game controller” can no longer be called a JOYSTICK because no teenage boy EVER wants to hear that word come out of his mother’s mouth, no matter WHAT the context. But we moms first learned this word back in the 80s when video games were new, and we lacked the guile to understand the word’s bomber pilot origins. In complete innocence - I SWEAR, we think nothing of repeating the word “joystick” over and over, as our sons’ faces turn red. Luckily for boys, Dads are endowed with better sense.

Back in the eighties, I became a gas station pump monkey to earn money for college. When someone wanted their oil checked, I had to first locate their DIPSTICK, which wasn’t always easy in some of those old muscle cars. As an impressionable young girl, I didn’t know that repeating the word “dipstick” would endlessly amuse a male population perfectly capable of checking its own oil. I’m not sure if it was my worldly vocabulary or the opportunity to have a 19 year old girl inside their hood that made every “dipstick” in town want to get his oil checked during my shift. Euphemistically speaking of course…

To top it all off, I now have to deal with Lady Gaga’s DISCO STICK which elicits giggles from the back seat every time I sing along. So I’m guessing that we’ve got another inappropriate EUPHEMISM on our hands. And yet ANOTHER song that needs to be purchased as a “clean” version. Though I’m not sure that the cleaning program is sophisticated enough to remove this particular idiomatic “verbum non gratum.” And while we are on the subject of lyrics, “Shawty” is ok, it just means hot girl, or girlfriend, and NOT all the other stuff I THOUGHT it meant. So sing along without fear. (At least for now. Definitions seem to devolve in the music world.)

From now on, to be safe, I’m simply going to stop saying “STICK.” So I need a synonym that will help me avoid any perception of being inappropriately “euphemistic.” Especially around minors and garden club grannies. Maybe I could substitute “branch” or “twig”…or given the popularity of Harry Potter, “WAND.” (Which I now see would yield, among other things, the unfortunate, “dip wand.”) Or maybe, I should just quit while I’m ahead.

----------------------------------------------------
Visit http://www.laughoutloudmom.com/ to get your Weekly Chuckle!