This has been a swearing kind of month, but what can I say, I grew up on music by rappers like Wu-Tang, (cash rules everything around me) so I'm kind of a vulgarity connoisseur.
One of my favorite things is when we Christians put a holy spin on foul language. We know at some point we'll stub our toe against the corner of our couch and will need a phrase to scream out. But instead of swearing, we'll yell at the top of our lungs, "That hurt like H E Double Hockey Sticks!" Or we'll say, "Dang," or "Shoot." If you're really religious though, you'll try to turn it into a worship moment. "Praise the Lord! It really hurt when I dropped that Precious Moments figure on my foot!"
One of my favorite things is when we Christians put a holy spin on foul language. We know at some point we'll stub our toe against the corner of our couch and will need a phrase to scream out. But instead of swearing, we'll yell at the top of our lungs, "That hurt like H E Double Hockey Sticks!" Or we'll say, "Dang," or "Shoot." If you're really religious though, you'll try to turn it into a worship moment. "Praise the Lord! It really hurt when I dropped that Precious Moments figure on my foot!"
It's exactly what CBS did when they played the Bruce Willis movie, Die Hard 3, on television. When one of the characters was about to drop an MF, they instead made him scream out, "You melon farmer! Melon farmer!"
That's funny to me. Swears are kind of funny to me too. They're just words that over the centuries we've given power to. We've assigned them strength and importance and of course a degree of crudeness. But ultimately, they're just words.
I'm all for not swearing, but cleaning up your mouth is really just a symptom. Maybe you're supposed to work on your anger or your unhappiness that is producing your son of a gun foul mouth. It's like people that go to all you can eat fried snickers and mayonnaise buffets and order a diet Coke. That's great that you're drinking diet Coke, but come on dude, it's the mayonnaise fritter balls that are going to kill you.
52 comments:
One of my favorite movie dub-overs was actually not to cover a cuss word, but to cover a non-PC word. In Water World (horrible movie, don't watch it!), the bad guy Deacon calls the good guy, Mariner, a "total freakin' retard." On TV, while his mouth says them, we hear, "You're a total sliiiime ball." Not kidding.
I spent a year studying in Berlin last year and had a really hard time getting used to the way Germans use American cuss-words... i.e. not as cuss-words. The hardest one was the f-word, which I consider the most offensive of cuss-words heard in common speech - to them, it's about like saying "oh poop". I guess if it's foreign that makes it less offensive. They also like to use our s-word as a milder version of their own, but they say it with this great German accent that always makes me giggle!
Speaking of fried Snickers, if you're ever up on the NW side of town, Buckhead Burrito Grill in Kennesaw has an amazing fried Snickers.
fried snickers? as in the chocolate bar?!? I've never heard of that... lol
I remember I used to struggle a lot with swearing, but then I realized that maybe it wasn't the swearing I was struggling with - maybe it was the attitude and circumstances that caused the swearing. So, I just stopped swearing. I still slip up here and there, because I'm not perfect, but oh well. I think saying "dang" is JUST as bad as saying "damn" and saying "Oh, that makes me so freaking mad" is just as horrible as replacing freaking with an actual F-Bomb. It's just that saying dang and freaking are acceptable in church. But, aren't dang and freaking just swear words in disguise? Yea.
So, what are your thought on turning secular songs into worship songs? I seem to have a mutant "Weird Al" gene which allows me to turn just anything into a worship song. (Weird, I know.) A musician friend of mine asked me to re-write the lyrics to Aerosmith's "Walk this Way". Being a fan of the band, I happen to know that before rap music came along, this was probably one of the dirtiest songs on record. So at first, I resisted. But he finally wore me down and I did it. It was pretty corny, but he liked it...
Yippie-ki-yay, my friend.
My favorite dub-over was in the Breakfast Club. Instead of "eat my shorts", it became "Eat..my...socks!" And yes, I agree. Words are words, it's what behind them that matters.
Yippie-ki-ay, Mr. Falcon!
Okay I can't believe you used this example!! I saw that exact dub about 7 or 8 years ago when I was watching it on TV and about died laughing.
Yippie-kai-ay Melon Farmer!
So funny. I was just thinking about this. (Maybe there was something in the air?)
I'm raising young children right now, when the motivation behind obedience doesn't matter as much as obedience. But coming out of a Pharisee subculture, my soul is desperate for them to ask the "why" questions.
So why is swearing frowned upon? Because it reveals an attitude of anger. The word is mostly immaterial.
I'm with you Jon, I think cuss words are kinda funny. My wife thinks I'm a total freakin' retard because when someone cusses in a song I'll bust out laughing.
Glad it's not just me.
Jon, that's not even my favorite swear edit from the Die Hard series.
When the original first came to TV, they thought the iconic line "Yippy-kay-yea, Mr. Falcon" was their best option. I was awfully confused at this introduction of a wholly new character and spent the rest of the film trying to figure out who this evil-mastermind Mr. Falcon was.
My biggest fear, okay, maybe not THE biggest but it does worry me sometimes, is that if I ever get alzheimers that all those cuss words that I don't say but think will become common usage because I have cleaned up my mouth but not the attitude and thoughts behind it. Talk about destroying 60 years worth of testimony.
I'm probably going to hell for this, but here goes anyway!
I don't see anywhere in the Bible a list of words we can't use. It's a strange thing --- we have a list of words everyone knows by virtue of the fact they know they're not allowed to use them. That list is given to us by society (hence the legitimacy of the f-bomb in Germany).
Think about it. Who decides what words are allowed and which ones aren't? Why is it there are words in the King James Bible I'm not allowed to use in church?
To me, this means that it is not automatically wrong to use such a word. It is not a sin in the same way murder and adultery are. Of course, such words can be used sinfully (for example, take the word 'raca,' which, by the way, Jesus said in public!). But they do not, by themselves make you unclean.
Or, as I heard it put recently, 'swearing is a matter of manners, not morals.'
Food for thought!
Holy crap! I thought I was the only one that had ever seen the TV version of DH3. I have since used the term "melon farmer" just because I found it so hilarious.
C.R.E.A.M.
dollar dollar bill y'all
Sooooo true.. I have theee worst potty mouth when I get angry. It's basically an anger issue IMO.
Funny example a friend showed me. In story of David and Jonathan in the Bible, Saul calls Jonathan at one point a "son of a perverse and rebellious woman." This was in a recent NIV version. He pulled out an older King James Version and showed it to me. It read "Son of a ....."
So maybe this isn't the forum to talk about the best dub on TNT or USA or ABC Family - but the one from The Usual Suspects gets me everytime.
"Give me the keys you, (word that rhymes with "brother trucker")
became
"Give me the keys, you Fairy Godmother."
Genius.
I was just wondering how you become the person who makes up lines like that. Is that an entire department over at Turner?
The occasional use of a bad word doesn't bother me. It's when people use these words in EVERY sentence, often every other word, that bothers me. Come on! Get a dictionary, a thesaurus - something! Just stop *@# using *@# words all the *@# time like you don't *#@ have any *#@ thing else to *#@ say! See what I mean? It's extremely annoying, isn't it? Or how 'bout listening to Grandma's advice, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anthing at all". Just do the hold your breath and grunt thing. Sometimes facial expressions say more than words.
My favorite thing is when TV or movies begin with somebody holding up a middle finger. And then they digitally blur the finger. You can still see that it's a blurry finger, so they are not trying to convince us that it's not going on... it's just... blurry.
The only thing I can figure is the finger most be erotic, inapprioriate, or something, to some strange group of people. Blurring the finger is the equivalent of putting those little black bars over the places our bathing suits are supposed to cover.
Note to self: DON'T DRINK while reading SCL. I just about choked on my water when I read "mayonnaise fritter balls".
@ Joseph- I'm confused. KJV says "perverse rebellious woman" too.
???
I used to teach at a private Christian school. The kids there weren't allowed to say certain words and had very interesting substitutions. I grew up having to say, "This stinks." These kids say, "This vacuums." or "This Hoovers."
Tricky Tricky!
Oh my word! (There's a holier version than God's name in vain...) You were already cool, but the fact that you know and love "melon farmer" makes you even cooler! Die Hard 3 had my favorite dub ever, "Yippee-ki-yay, melon farmer!" But one of the other Die Hard movies was once dubbed, "Yippee-ki-yay, Mister Falcon," which, honestly, is nearly as good. Since my brothers and I first watched those, we've been calling people melon farmers and Mr. Falcon. Usually people have no clue what we're saying, and we really don't mean it as the words they replaced - they just make us laugh.
Other great movie dubs that I've seen include "stuff you!" and "kiss my ashes!" I'm sure you can deduce which words were replaced. Let me just tell you though, that there is really not much more entertaining in this modern world than watching Vin Diesel looking all tough and telling someone to kiss his ashes.
One of my youth ministers told me said "hail damage" when he felt like cussing.
I actaully heard a christian guy I konw say "What the Chicken" instead of WTF. When you're making a substitution that's that wierd it's comes off smelling like "Hey look at Me I don't swear!"
I've always wondered "why" certain words are cuss words and others aren't. I think it almost always comes down to culture.
When a group from our church went to Uganda, they found that "sh--" was the common way to describe bodily waste elimination. One of our ladies asked a Ugandan pastor's wife where the restroom was, and the pastor's wife asked, "Do you need to sh--?"
And then there's the word "bloody" which is sort of the British cousin of the f-bomb, but we think nothing of it...
My friends and I have what we call the "pants game". With movies we've seen over and over, we take the famous quotes and replace one of the words with "pants". So in Lord of the Rings, where Boromir says "Gondor has no king. Gondor needs no king," we turned it into "Gondor has no pants..."
So I'm wondering if the dubbing editors play this game with each other and try to come up with the most ridiculous edit. Take Predator. Wouldn't be awesome if Ahnold said, "You are one ugly Melon Farmer!"
I just found a new game. I'm excited. Maybe when I have kids I'll teach it to them from the time they're little so that the first time they hear someone swear for real, they'll just shout out "melon farmer!" and everyone will laugh.
Great thoughts on this stuff. Anyone else had experiences with TV Guardian? It's this box you can hook up to your TV to improve the language, even if you're watching a DVD. It can't really distinguish a wholesome context from a "bad" one, though. This causes some fun whenever a person mentions God in a wholesome way and TVG says "man."
I hate that thing.
We had something like TV Guardian, but maybe it was an old version, because every time it bleeped out the word, it would show it in subtitles on the screen. So, if you were under the age of 5, you didnt know what was being said. Otherwise, you got to read it instead of hearing it.
When I was growing up, our pastor chose a Bible passage to be read by one of the deacons each Sunday. I remember this one deacon who always seemed to be the one to have to read about Balaam’s donkey…of course, he read from the KJV, so the other word was used. The next time he had to read, it was another verse with the “a” word…he was convinced the pastor was messing with him.
See, there are “bad” words in the Bible, too! You know, used out of context.
When I was about ten years old, I watched an episode of Murphy Brown where she says, “I knocked him on his as…tronomical ego.” I went to a really conservative private school, and I used that to insult people for about three years!
I was watchin "The
Matrix" on TV and the part when Neo flips agent smith off and says: "How about I give you the finger.." Well, Neo still said that line on TV. Only thing is they edited out the finger, so it was just his fist. I cracked up. It was friggin hilarious! I thin swear words are funny too.
Ha! I forgot about TV Guardian. My in-laws have it and it is cranked ALLL the way up. It is seriously obnoxious to the point where everything is edited and you can't figure out the story line. I remember watching CSI once and couldn't for the life of me figure out what "cigarette tails" were. I was halfway into the show before I realized that they were, of course, referring to cigarette butts. I still have no idea how they caught the murderer in that episode.
Add to that the fact that my father in law spends most of the time trying to figure out the content that he purchased the machine to edit out in the first place and you have a serious waste of time and money.
My favorite TV dub is Michael J. Fox in Doc Hollywood:
"You slug in a ditch!"
so we were playing "Bible feud" with a group of Christian senior citizens, and the topic was "animals of the bible" One answer given was an ass, so the game show host got to look toward the screen and say in his best Richard Dawson voice...
"Show me an ass!!"
None of the seniors cracked a smile, but the tech guys back at the soundboard fell of their chairs laughing...
Also, if you ever need to take someones name in vain, may I suggest Bob Saget? Great guy, but his name just has a good ring to it when you stub your toe... Try it -- you'll thank me later :)
Bowdlerizations are usually humorous, but I have to admit I use them because that's what Christians do. Except if you're E/emergent/ing...then all bets are off.
Is there a linguist in the house that can help us with this? Or is that too academic for the church?
I forgot to mention, didn't Paul say something about what comes out of us makes us evil? It's all well and good to think about our intentions, but the actual words we use have something to them.
There's some philosophy term for this that I'm not remembering.
Agghhhh! Mayonnaise fritter balls had me laughing so hard I nearly fell out of bed last night reading my print out copy of the post! Die Hard has totally ruined me for Yippee-Kai-Yay. Every single time I hear it, whether it's Backyardigans or SpongeBob or whichever innocuous kiddie character who says it, in my head Bruce Willis always finishes it. I'll have to try to replace that brain intrusion with "melon farmer" from now on...too funny! And hearing cuss words called' "swears" makes me giggle a little bit too...never heard that before SCL!
Here goes my nerdiness. Most curse words or foul language were considered that because they were not Latin or proper Latin but came from bad French or the English peasants. Even Shakespeare was sometimes considered to be foul because he did not use proper English or write in Latin but chose to write the language of the ordinary people and what ordinary people liked.
totally agree that they're just words to which society has assigned power, and it's really not a moral issue but a class/manners issue.
i drop my class/manners both in traffic and when stubbing my toe.
and it's just a symptom. you're right.
The absolute strangest TV edit for a swearing session in a movie would have to be from The Big Lebowski.
John Goodman's character, while destroying a corvette with a crow bar, is screaming: "This is what happens when you f*** a stranger in the a**!"
Use your imagination.
Coincidentally, television editors did already.
The genius replacement to this colorful display turned out to be this: "This is what happens when you find a stranger in the alps!"
Yup. Wonderful.
I had to revisit the comments on this post to see if anyone mentioned my all-time favorite cuss words that weren't really cuss words. Does anyone remember the movie "Johnny Dangerously"?
No?!?....
"Farging Bastitches!"
Lol :)
Once my friends and I were acting out a scene from The Chronicles of Narnia, in which one of the children (Peter I think) said "shut-up". None of us wanted to say that so instead we said "mild bleep-bleep!" Consequently we all cracked up and the scene was ruined ;)
In really stressful situations it's really fun to be "angry" then all the sudden say "badwordsbadwords" in a serious/squeaky voice, it almost always lightens a situation, besides giving the people around you something to talk about once you are gone ;)
Hey just a fun fact for your next Jeopardy appearance. Most of "our" bad words are simply anglo saxon words. When the Normans invaded England their culture was made dominant and "better" than the indigenous Anglo-Saxon culture. So if you were a Norman having relations with your spouse you fornicated, but if you were an Anglo-Saxon you f***ed. Of course they would have all the hang ups that we do because it was a normal word for them. So the nature of the word isn't bad it's actually the result of a hostile cultural take over. However since most people in the US today consider that a "naughty" word one should consider their company wisely before using any questionable epithets they feel led to use. If you win final jeopardy you can thank God for creating Prodigal Jon and instilling in him the desire to blog.
Robocop TV version, Dick Jones speaking in the bathroom: 'once I even called him... airhead' instead of a$$hole. Probably my second fave dub-over after melon farmer (which a few friends started using regularly after hearing it). Or how about the TV version of Tango & Cash: 'Rambo is a primative' (replacing 'pussy' which at the end of the day, is just a cat, consarn it!)
That poster was right about differences between countries though, here in the UK calling someone an 'arse' for example is no big deal at all.
When I was in college, I used to make fun of people screaming "Jesus Christ" when they got mad, I would yell random names, like John Cougar Melloncamp or Mark Henry Johnson. I got the most bizzare looks, but once I explained the reason, people stopped using His name crudely. Ephesians 5:3-4 explains that obscenity, coarse joking and foolish talk ...are out of place for God's people. But, you are right, it isn't the words, but the attitude.
i will never, ever forget my shock when, as a teenager, i heard my seemingly very conservative, Christian grandmother curse a couple of times. once in reference to being tired of women in our church 'complaining' (insert synonym here). she was venting and all i could do was sit there and pretend she hadn't said anything so shocking!
i have two less offensive cuss words that i alternate when necessary...but there are times when i say 'crap' (a very fav word of mine) or 'dangit' and people look at me as if i've just dropped the f-bomb. there's a lot to say for attitude and meaning behind words. (and i still won't say crap or dangit around my grandfather...)
oh! on a final note (sorry about my novel in comment form)...can't believe no one has brought up those orbit gum commercials!! the ones where people are arguing and calling each other names, but they're not really saying anything 'bad', and then you have the british orbit gum girl, 'Fabulous! New Orbit Raspberry Mint cleans another dirty mouth.'
Maybe orbit should be a sponsor of your church...and you can throw it out with skittles!
'Fabulous! Orbit is the #1 gum preferred among dirty mouthed Christians everywhere!'
"...mayonnaise fritter balls..."
That made me cringe.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the dad in Christmas Story. It's hard to stay angry when you stub your toe and say "Rassin frassin snickelfifer!!!!"
"Johnny Dangerously"?
No?!?....
"Farging Bastitches!"
Cracking me up!!!
Two points:
1) Someone said something about Germans swearing casually. This is spot-on. My Moms side of the family is German, and one time my teenage cousin was over visiting and wanted to play Blink-182's live CD in our living room stereo. This particular CD has a song made up ENTIRELY of swear words strung together in long nonsensical phrases and my cousin was kinda smiling mischieviously as it began. I meanwhile lept up to shut off the stereo and rapidly suggested an alternate activity because my parents were standing there awkwardly, unsure of what to say.
2)Someone here suggested that Bob Saget is a good guy. While that is probably debatable, most people dont realize he became famous for his "blue comedy" routines which were so foul they shocked even his fellow blue comedians. How he ever got signed up for "Full House", I'll never know.
WV: raletsme, something you shout out in a Klingon bar "Yo bartender, raletsme!"
Just a few weeks ago, my husband caught me cussing my baby's diaper (the velcro tabs wouldn't un-velcro) by saying, "HUGGIEEEEEEEEEES." I really felt much better afterwards. I also like to cuss by saying, "Cussword!"
And my 9th grade English teacher spent an entire class period explaining the origination of the F-word. No joke. I still remember it today -- Forbidden Use of Carnal Knowledge and Forbidden Under the Crown of the King. Not sure how true the lesson was, but can you imagine submitting that lesson plan?
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