Nice words for dirty things
A nasty subject (sorry!) followed by a Christian one
Dear Randy Fan,
Nobody updates you on the lingo until it’s too late, and the way you generally find out is a kid turns red and laughs at you in public. When I was a teen you could call somebody Smashley, referring to her being a drunk. Now smash means making whoopie, and Smashley refers to her being a slut. Thus it’s a bad nickname to give a younger manager — and don’t ask me or anybody else how I found out. But I suppose nobody updated the whoopie cushion people either, so if this happened to you, you’re not the first: I advise you to get over it.
Another “fun” one is cake, which used to mean easy, but now means ass. And pound means to have sex with, so pound cake took a double beating. The boys I worked with in a bakery really thought this one was a hoot. Fortunately hoot never got an update — our 80 year olds use it exactly as God intended, so nobody can laugh at me here for stepping in a pile three times. At least not for a few more years.
The worst is probably pegged, which, when I was a kid, meant figured out. We would say you’ve got me pegged and nobody would spit their food out. Now it also has to do with rear-ends — and no, don’t look that one up. I’m guessing Mormons googling it is part of the reason why Utah, up until recently, had the worst statistics for gay porn searches. The biggest casualty of this slang is any old lady named Peggy, who never saw it coming, and got far worse than even people named Gaylord — the last world record for an unintended crash-and-burn. Gaylord was supposed to mean a guy having a great time on top of the world. Now it generally means the world having a great time piled on top of him.
You’ll notice that almost all the slang words listed above have to do with sex or something related to it. I mention these not because they're the only ones I care about, but because they hurt the worst when you bump into them accidentally — which I have a tendency to do. We have yet to find whether we (like the Eskimo) have the most words for the things we’re obsessed with, or whether we’re just trying to fool our parents. I almost suspect it’s the opposite of perversion: hearing our parents talk about sex disgusts us, so we have a new set of terms every so often to put a fresh spin on the eight-legged monster.
As proof of this I note the fact that nobody (I repeat, nobody) sounds worse about sex than a pastor ex cathedra, maybe because his euphemisms are at least four-thousand years old, and went putrid sometime in the Dark Ages. “And Adam knew his wife,” "Carnality,” (yes, as in, meat) “And the two shall become one flesh” — “Your breasts are like fawns.” Each of these “euphemisms” sounds like Buffalo Bill and makes me want to throw up. I'd rather have people just smash or pound cake — although we can leave pegging to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Yours,
-J
P.S. Although Christian euphemisms are by far the most disturbing (to me), they aren't by any means alone — in the common American usage we find intimacy, intercourse, doing it, and everyone’s favorite penetration: all words which used to mean other things, and now are totally gross and almost dangerous to use in the breakroom — even if they're used appropriately.
Like the words retard, special, and imbecile, we find that burying a horrible thing in a nice word eventually makes the word stink. The same goes for latrine, which became water closet, which became bathroom — which somehow became restroom, despite Americans struggling desperately on the John for ten minutes (maybe take a walk sometimes you guys). It's virtually impossible to cover up something you find disturbing, and liberals have yet to explain why they keep shifting from negroes, to colored people, to black people, to African American.
Back to the subject, though, and we find the power of sex so overwhelming and distressing (and let’s be frank here: annoying) that even Cicero the pagan can’t wait to get old and shake it.
But you may urge—there is not the same tingling sensation of pleasure in old men. No doubt; but neither do they miss it so much. For nothing gives you uneasiness which you do not miss. That was a fine answer of Sophocles to a man who asked him, when in extreme old age, whether he was still a lover. "Heaven forbid!" he replied; "I was only too glad to escape from that, as though from a boorish and insane master." To men indeed who are keen after such things it may possibly appear disagreeable and uncomfortable to be without them; but to jaded appetites it is pleasanter to lack than to enjoy.
Thus to those who believe Christians invented sexual paranoia, the fear and embarrassment have been there a long time, and both happen whether God sacrifices Himself for you or you have to sacrifice a goat. Cicero listed getting old and fizzing out as the “happy” ending (another one!), but there are alternate scenarios, and they’re much more disturbing. Nora Ephron, for one, isn’t so hopeful about men shaking off the demon, and she has Arthur say, in Heartburn,
“You know how old you have to be before you stop wanting to f— strangers?” said Arthur. “Dead, that’s how old. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t go away. You put all this energy into suppressing it and telling yourself it’s worth it because of what you get in exchange, and then one day someone brushes up against you and you’re fourteen years old again and all you want to do is go to a drive-in movie and f— her brains out in the back seat.
A nightmare scenario, I think, but totally possible: we’ve all seen our dirty old men staring at the teenagers, and we have yet to ask whether it’s more disturbing to see one or to be one. We can only hope we master the urge before it masters us — and we end up becoming defined by it.
Tolstoy says, in the Pevear translation of The Kreutzer Sonata,
To be a fornicator is a physical condition similar to the condition of a morphine addict, a drunkard, a smoker. As a morphine addict, a drunkard, a smoker is not a normal person, so a man who has known several women for his own pleasure is no longer normal, but is corrupted forever—a fornicator. As a drunkard or a morphine addict can be recognized at once by his face, his manner, so, too, a fornicator. A fornicator may abstain, struggle; but he will never have a simple, clear, pure, brotherly relation to women. You can recognize a fornicator at once by the way he eyes a young woman and looks her over.
The irony is, the very success of a sexual career is the cause of the derangement. You’re most likely to end up disgusting when women at one time found you enchanting. Then physical health itself becomes a sickness — and to its targets, a fear and a nuisance.
Sex belongs to the young and the deranged. It’s either fresh and innocent or it’s rotten. Nobody knows exactly where the line is, but we all know when it’s been crossed.
POST-ESSAY DISCLAIMER:
The way this essay ends disturbs me — although after looking it over, the beginning should too, and in some ways probably worse.
The reason I don’t like the second part is simple: my outlook on sex, at least insofar as it’s explained here — as a kind of laughing, bomb-throwing anarchist at the church picnic — makes me look far better than I actually am. But the truth is far less agreeable. In fact if I had to grade myself, I’d give myself a A+ for my words here, a solid C for my real-life behavior — that is, placing me square between a Victorian clergyman and the average Bengalese panty-sniffer — and an outright F- for whatever happens in my mind: only God knows what lurks there, and, quite frankly, I feel embarrassed about it.
I mention this here because all secrets come out at the Final Judgment, and I believe it’s best to confess here before I end up like some American pastor or congressman. You know, the ones who go on a holy crusade about “family values” right before some vice cop busts them in the airport bathroom trying to get randy with strangers.
So let me confess to you here: I haven’t been clean since I was a kid. It’s been a downhill slide ever since, with some minor victories sandwiched here and there. And shy of a few invalids, defectives, and reactionaries horrified by their own deadbeat parents, I don’t believe anybody ever is clean. I repeat: I believe the whole crusade against impurity, as defined by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, is largely a sham — and that 99% of the time, the people who claim to be following it most closely are frauds. They’re like the coworkers who spray Lysol after blowing up the bathroom — we can all smell the biohazard, and now, to make things worse, we’re also getting an eye-watering dose of poison. Nature gives way to shame, which gives way to outright lies and bunk remedies — a series of seminars and sermons, largely ineffective for the mind, and resulting in a game of make-believe. As children we pretend to be heroes. As adults we pretend to not be villains.
I’m not saying people can’t learn to keep their pants on. I’m also not saying we should just give up fighting and just allow filth. Porn ought to be banned and dress codes ought to be enforced and TV needs to be cleaned up. We ought to (read: ought to) keep our eyes above a neck, although a good face is just as much a temptation as anything else (thank God most women don’t have them). What I’m saying is that healthy people can’t learn to turn their minds off — they can only blow their brains out.
I don’t know how anyone can be a holy man and a horndog at the same time — which I admit may be the only possibility. God help us all: the very things that make life are the same things that are killing us.