Things our parents told us not to say
While I was growing up my mom was always correcting my grammar and telling me not to use certain expressions. “Don’t say ‘gypped’!” she would scold. Or “don’t say ‘not that bad’, say ‘not VERY bad’,” and so on. I can’t say that I took any of these scoldings to heart, but it’s amusing to think back on the kinds of things that offended her generation. Not counting swear words, what were you scolded about saying?
June 21st, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Hmm, strangely enough I recall being told not to say ‘the bomb’ as in ‘That party was the bomb’. I was also told not use the expression ‘ghetto’ as it described a real place where real, really terrible things happened. Lastly, ‘comedy’ was frowned upon. As used in the sense of ‘That party was comedy!’. That one wasn’t so much offensive as it was funny to her. Now I just need to work on getting her to call it ‘Best Buy’ and not ‘Best Buy’s’. There is not an ’s’ at the end of every company name!
June 21st, 2007 at 6:15 pm
I remember being scolded for using “that” as in “I don’t have that much homework to do”. My mother would always say “How much is THAT much??” Of course, she did have reason to wonder as I rarely did any homework at all. My siblings and I were taught very young what expressions were racist or offensive to others and did not use them at all. I also was punished severly for using any kind of swear word. My mother cussed like a sailor’s parrot, but she really lit into us if we tried to utter so much as a genteel “damn”. As soon as I left home I made up for lost time by expanding my vocabulary in a colorful way, but have since decided that I do not have to use four letter words to describe how I feel. “Oh my goodness” is about as raunchy as I get these days.
June 22nd, 2007 at 6:07 pm
I can remember my mother telling my siblings and I to stop yelling SHUT UP to each other. She thought it was very crude so we would yell at the top of our lungs: PLEASE BE QUIET.
June 24th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
One word I remember being told not to say (or more so I remember my brother being told not to say) was “moded” as in “oh, you just got moded!”, describing someone getting “burned” or humiliated in some way.