I remember a day back during my senior year of high school, when I was sitting in my AP German class. The class was generally run at a nice, leisurely pace, and I always had a pretty good time there. Everyone in the class knew each other, and we were all pretty decent friends. I recall one specific day in particular where some anonymous buddy chucked a pencil at me from across the room, hitting me right on the face. It wasn’t a terrible, blinding pain or anything, but it didn’t exactly feel great, either. “Ow,” was all I really said as I rubbed my cheek. “What the hell, dude!”

And that’s when it happened - my teacher gasped out, in an apparent moment of shock. She demanded I repeat to her what I had just said, and so I told her - and right then and there, she wrote me up for a god damned detention, for a “vulgar use of profanity in the classroom.”

Of all the really stupid things in modern day society that bother me, one of the worst ones is probably the concept of censorship. For instance, I know had I said something “nicer” or more innocent sounding instead, like “what the heck,” my teacher probably wouldn’t have looked twice. But really, it’s not like my meaning or the point I’m making is any different, I’m just using what’s considered a “nicer” word.

Remember that episode of Recess where TJ invented a new word - “womp” ? I sure do. He was tired of all the bullshit about censorship, and so he was like, “okay. If you’re going to get mad at me for saying a word, I’ll just say the same thing with a different word.” And for the whole episode, he’d go around saying things like “this womps,” and other clever uses of the phrase.

But - here’s the thing - whether or not TJ was saying “don’t fuck with me,” “don’t mess with me,” or “don’t womp with me” - he was saying the same thing. They’re two different words that mean the same thing! They’re called synonyms.

Much like I can say “I went down to the store today” or a more cultured, sophisticated, “this afternoon, I traversed across the city to the Grocery and Department shop,” while they’re two different sentences, they mean entirely the same thing.

And there’s the hypocritical blindness of our modern censorship movement. When we tell children, youth, or anyone to say things like “muck” or “screw” instead of “fuck,” “heck” instead of “hell,” and “dang” or “darn” instead of “damn,” all we’re doing is painting those choice words as “bad,” when that’s really all they are - words.

Just like the teachers in Recess eventually figured out “womp” meant the same thing as other words and shouldn’t be allowed to be said, our conservative culture needs to realize the same thing applies to their own movement. It’s not the words themselves that should be stigmatized against - it’s the meaning behind those words. Otherwise, what’s to stop “heck” from one day becoming a bad word?

… Either way, the issue of censorship is a total bullshit one anyway. Even if the meaning behind those words is “mean” or “not nice,” it shouldn’t be anyone’s business to interfere. Making other people conform to your own social standards simply because you don’t want to be offended is a selfish, self-deprecating system that eventually leads to a substanceless, cultureless society - especially in regards to all that “political correctness” garbage - holy shit, does that whole issue piss me off.

… but that’s a subject for another day.

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