Tossing this here from this thread, Beth made the observation:

I have mixed feelings about this angle, because I don't think the whole world of adult entertainment should revolve around the question of "but what about the children?" But I do think that "the children" are one consideration here. You and I can hear that joke and maybe find it troubling, maybe not, but we do know that at the heart of it Silverman at least acknowledges that "chink" is an offensive term. (Whether she acknowledges how offensive it is, I don't know.) Maybe a 12-year-old hears it and just comes away thinking that "chink" is a word that's okay to say on network television, and that it makes people laugh. I don't think that's grounds for censorship and I think it's okay to say that we only have to gear late-night television to adult sensibilities, but it is an angle that nobody's mentioned.

Thoughts? Kind of ties in with the 'books we were too young to read' thing - does anyone remember their first time being exposed to a racially derogatory word?

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Answers

I don't have kids, yet, but I was raised in a house that considered "dang" a swear word. In fact my mother still demands that I use not use "freakin'" in her house.

A friend and I got into a big argument about this last fall. We were at a bowling alley (me, rog, friend, other friend) and two lanes over was a family with two kids, maybe 8 and 10.

So, you know, we're bowling, we laughing, we being idiots, it's what we do. But every time the friend had a bad throw, which was often, he'd say, loudly, "Fuck! Did you fucking see that? Fuck fuck fuck!" And so on.

So later when we vacated the lanes and were sitting around talking I told him that in my opinion it is inappropriate to use language like that in places where other people's children are around. Places like bowling alleys, stores, baseball games, restaurants, what have you.

He countered that in 3rd grade he'd been sent home for calling his teacher a "lousy mother-fucker" for making him take a nap, he heard language like that at home all the time, and that he thinks all kids are exposed to bad language at a young age, with my family be the only single glaring exception in all of the US, and it's not his job to censor the world of language for other people's kids.

I countered with, first of all, I don't think that households without swearing is as uncommon as he thinks. And that, regardless of what they hear at home, it is not his or my decision what language is appropriate for other people's children to hear. If they believe their children shouldn't hear that language they should be able to go places that families go to with a reasonable expectation that people won't be yelling swear words out every five minutes. If you are in a bar or Frederick's of Hollywood or a place that clearly isn't for families or children, that's one thing. But if you are going to exist in the larger world you have to realize that some people don't want their kids hearing it, some adults don't even want to hear it. The sentiments can be expressed without having to use swear words.

I don't think children should be sheltered from everything in life, including language, violence and sexuality, but I also think it's not my place to decide what language is appropriate for someone else's 8 year to hear in a bowling alley.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

I have mixed feelings about swear words in front of kids. I try very hard not to swear in front of kids in my home, their home, other people's homes. I care a little less in more public places, although I still try in kid-friendly places like parks, etc. I care even less about it if I'm somewhere that's basically a grown-up place. And for the parents who chided me on the bus for taking the Lord's name in vain in front of their kids: um, yeah. I think you know what I think.

Racial slurs, though -- I do remember the first time I heard the "n" word and asked my folks what it meant. Those were the most verboten words in our household, worthy of a spanking. They probably still are; I don't think I'd test it.

If I had kids? I guess I'd have to watch my own language (swearing, I mean; I don't use racial slurs), but I'd probably slip often enough that I couldn't really have too much of a fit if someone else did, too. As for racial slurs, I'm sure they'd prompt a discussion with the kids, and probably a "please don't" to the offenders.

This reminds me of Kymm's old entry, though, which I think she just linked to recently, about the time she called a guy a pain in the ass and he told her that he didn't allow language like that to be spoken around him. That sort of attitude cracks me up: I, personally, control your speech, and I don't permit that kind of talk! Bah.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Oddly enough, my 2nd grade teacher was fired for calling one of the kids a motherfucker - none of us, the kid included, had ever heard it before and had no idea what it meant. Just that her face was purple at the time.

We all asked what it meant to our parents, and I don't think a one of us got an answer that made sense, but we got a lot of shocked looks, one fired teacher (ooh, the power!), and a couple of the kids at least were punished for asking the question.

There was a rash of secretive 'motherfucker' swearing that year - all we got out of it was that it was one verrrry powerful word, and that made it attractive.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

A teacher at my high school had to apologize to me for swearing at me -- I can't remember what he said; I think it was "fucking bitch."

The circumstances were weird. It was a science class, and I was one of only two girls in the class. For some reason we were talking about police brutality, not physics, and he was basically espousing the idea that police should be able to beat the hell out of people who smart off to them. He didn't call me a fucking bitch; he got right up in my personal space when I disagreed, and he said something like, "So you wouldn't hit somebody who got in your face and said, You fucking bitch?" It was very odd; he was practically spitting in my face, and frankly he scared the shit out of me.

That was a really intimidating class anyway. Even though the other girl and I were two of the best students in the class and we both got (and deserved) A's, he always made me feel like we were the mascots, way too stupid to actually be there. He wavered between treating us like delicate flowers and trying to scare us to death.

Anyway, I mentioned the swearing incident to my parents, and my dad went through the roof. It was pretty embarrassing for me, especially when the teacher had to apologize, but in hindsight I don't think my dad acted inappropriately. The teacher was obnoxious, and we shouldn't have been talking about that stuff in a physics class, and no teacher needs to push their personal views onto a student with that kind of intimidation. The only dumb part is that I think it was the swearing that got him in trouble, not the behavior, and I think the behavior was the big deal. (Hell, my dad always swore in front of me, although he didn't say the f word.)

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

The high school I graduated from was an unusual place. It was started by parents who wanted a more progressive environment for their kids to learn in, and had a looser social structure than a lot of schools. It was also pre-school through high school, so as you can imagine, the younger kids were frequently exposed to inappropriate language.

As a way of trying to get the older kids to watch their language around the younger, the staff would tell us about the time some visiting parents of a prospective student were touring the campus, and Jessie (the four-year-old daughter of one of the teachers) dropped one of her sneakers in a mud puddle right as the parents walked by.

Picture an angelic little blonde girl looking down at her muddied shoe and saying "Oh, fuck."

Needless to say, those parents did not enroll their child at the school.

--

As for hateful speech, I have a story that comes from my ex-wife. When she and her sister were young girls, one of their uncles (or some other friend of their mom's) was the first to expose them to the word "fag".

Their mom took them out for lunch that same day to a coffee shop that was a gay hangout, and after the meal was finished, explained to them that these people in this fun restaurant were gay, and what that meant, and that "fag" was not an okay word for them to use.

--

Myself, I try to watch my mouth in public places where kids abound. I don't always succeed. But I don't think that "the children" is ever a good reason to tone down language in entertainment/art geared towards adults... even hateful language, such as some of the stuff Tarantino uses in his films...

--

Wow, that was long. Hopefully at least the stories were entertaining.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

I think I love your ex-wife's mother!

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Not wanting to disrupt the squicky fun on the book thread with a serious question, so I'll ask it here.

How do those of you who are parents deal with the books your kids read, the movies they watch, etc.? Do you forbid them from reading or viewing certain things? What's your criteria? If you aren't the forbidding type, do you at least try to discourage your kids from reading books for which they aren't ready? Have you ever regretted letting your kid read a book or see a movie that you later decided was too advanced for them?

If you don't have kids, how do you think you *would* deal with it? I'm especially interested in hearing from the people like Alleline and Rudeboy, who have small children, as well as from people like Lynda, who've been through this with teenagers. How did your approach change as the kids got older, or how do you expect it to change?

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

When my stepson reached about 11, his mother decided he was all grown up. She took him to R rated movies, bought him inappropriate books, and basically stopped supervising him.

This was a big problem not only for his dad and me, because we looked like big old stuffy stick-in-the-muds when we tried to keep things age-appropriate, but also for him. He had nightmares from slasher movies and occult movies, for example, but his mom kept renting them for him. Also, there is just a lot of sex and violence in movies and cable TV that a person that age just doesn't need to experience.

We confronted his mother about this, but she had all the legal power - full custody - and wasn't above threatening us with court action to take our visitation away. Doubt she could have prevailed but she was completely capable of making us go through it. She did finally agree to cool it, but what I really think happened is that she convinced the kid to quit telling us about it. Poor kid.

When we realized we couldn't protect him from her influence we settled on trying to give him enough information and power to make his own choices. We told him he could just refuse to watch the movies she'd bring home for him, for example, until we'd seen them and told him if they were non-violent or not. Put the books on his shelf and leave them there. That rebellious attitude toward his mother helped him cope, but it also eventually made it impossible for them to live together. Finally, we insisted he come to live with us and she was sick enough of the fighting that she let him go.

He seems to be okay now, but I suspect he would have a lot to contribute to that thread on books you were too young to read.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Racial slurs are absolutely verboten here, as are personal derogatory words, like "stupid" or any sort of name-calling. We have never allowed a kid to say something ugly about himself and get away with it (much less someone else) because that type of name-calling is so destructive. (I was raised in a house where the 'n' word was used regularly. Sent to a private school. Loathed, can I tell you, LOATHED, the whole lot of it, the entire racial ugliness, and turned out to be the radical liberal of the family... go figure.) At any rate, we worked hard to try to watch the language around the kids. (Irony -- I'm the one who slips up the most with the curse words and you know who gets most bothered by it? The boys. They're 14 and 18 and I've trained them so well,they'll gripe at me immediately. And I swear, they never slip up and say something. The oldest says that if someone is cussing, then they either haven't got or aren't bothering to use their intelligence to say it a better, smarter way. And I like to cuss, damnit. Where did I go wrong? oy.)

Anyway, as for age-appropriate reading material / movies, etc., we tried to watch it. Like Viv's stepson, my youngest was very sensitive to any sort of scary / gruesome movie, so we wouldn't let him see things if we knew it was too much. And while he groused about it occasionally, he really did like that we vetted it first, because the nightmares were awful. The older one handled things much better -- he has the ability to just watch and be more detached and to my knowledge, he's only had one or two nightmares in his life. It's not just the age, but the maturity level and/or the type of personality of the kid that you have to watch.

As for the whole kids in the public area (wow, this is so long, sorry)... I don't feel like someone else has to watch what they say, but I know I really do appreciate it when they make the effort. I've made it a point to thank them when they were obviously trying to watch it for the kids (when they were little).

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

One of my most vivid childhood memories is when I got in trouble for saying "booger". I got such a lectire from my Mom, and I had no idea why. Other people said "booger" and no one bothered them, but my mom all but washed my mouth out with soap. It took me, literally, 20 years to realize she thought I said "nigger". Then it all became clear. Actually, the n-word must not have even been in my vocabulary at the time, because I never made the connection. Well, I try not to swear too much in front of small children and mommies. Most people don't mind a few relatively tame curse words. And I figure if I'm going to swear, I should try to be creative about it.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

I remember it used to be that swear words were just wrong in 'polite' society. Fuck was just not a word you said ever. Which means that even though I do swear, I get really on edge when I am in a public place where people are swearing every second word. Slickery mentioned bowling and the kids. I don't swear in that situation, not cause of the kids, but because its just not polite.

Fuck is just so easy to say, and I was appalled when I realized that it had become a natural word to say for anything slightly bad. I've been trying to cut it out.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

Yea I agree... and I remember when it was not at ALL easy to say. Every bit as hard to force out then as 'the n-word' is now. It was 'the f-word'.

There was a book out in the 70s that would probably be really quaint now... I doubt it's in print, called "The Rape of the A.P.E. (American Purity Ethic)" that started out with a couple pages worth of "fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck...", and went on to say basically, Ok, now that we've gotten rid of the power of that word...

That'd fall totally flat now, but at the time it was like whoa! and making sure my mom didn't see me looking at that page full of fucks.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

I think Slickery has helped me figure out why I haven't been bowling much since moving to Seattle.

See, I *love* bowling. Back in Providence I used to go every Tuesday night with a group of friends. It was $18.00 to rent a lane from 9- midnight, so we could go pretty cheap. The place was always pretty deserted.

Part of bowling is cheering on your friends when they do well, and swearing really loudly when you fuck up. For this reason I can't *stand* bowling alleys out here that are all plastic and neon colors and crowded with little kids. Well, also because they get in my peripheral vision when I'm trying to bowl and I always end up throwing to the side.

Anyway, I have a really hard time with the "but what about the children" argument, but then again, *I don't have children*. I have never heard a good argument for why swearwords (shit, fuck, damn, ass, hell) are "bad" other than some puritan embarassment about natural bodily functions. I have heard plenty of arguments about why racist terms are bad, and they are bad on their own right, whether everyone around is white or not, whether everyone around is adults or kids or not. I can't in my mind find a logical reason why certain words are ok for adults to hear but not ok for kids to hear.

I think people in this country are overworked. Most families have both parents working, and in many of those at least one of the parent works two jobs or works and goes to school to get a better job. As such I think there isn't a lot of time for what's really needed: communication. I think it's much more constructive for parents to have an open dialog with their kids about why certain things aren't good (such as the example with the word 'fag' above) or why parents might be concerned about certain records/movies, and actually listen to the kids explain why they like them and try to understand that. I don't think anything positive is gained by either simple authoritarianism ("Do it because I said so" was a common phrase in my house, no wonder I grew up to be an anarchist) or by the urge of some parents to not recognize that their teenaged kids are not toddlers anymore.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

Well, you know... that's a whole other thing that's changed over the years, and it's sort of strange. Once upon a time, people were more aware of where it was appropriate to use certain language, but by the same token, there were a lot fewer places that were considered appropriate for kids - and frankly I miss that.

Forget 'what about the children'...what about the adults? There really ought to be more places where a grown up can go be a grown up without having to worry about whose child is there, or being disrupted by those kids. (Frankly, as a parent, if I've gone through the whole process of planning a night away from my own kids, the very last thing I want to do is wind up surrounded by someone else's!) I think that if we had firmer boundaries on that, a lot of adults would be more inclined to be a little more aware when they're in places that are unambiguously 'family orientied'.

It does seem strange that we've combined much looser social standards for behavior in general with a much looser definition of what situations are appropriate for kids to be around. The combination means they're exposed to a lot more than we were as kids...my personal take is that if parents would only reclaim the idea that they can set boundaries themselves on where they take kids, they'll get a lot farther than insisting the whole world become a playpen.

Ah...so Beth's question... I am either quite lenient or quite strict according to my kids, depending on whether or not I've said yes or no to them last.

I tend to take stronger issue with portrayals of meaningless violence than I do with language or sex - although I have a strong dislike for the irrelevent sex in some movies (I mean, when it has nothing at all to do with the plot and feels like an interruption of the storyline just to get that rating higher) and let them know that. After about 14 or so, I'm inclined to let them watch, but I view first so I know what I might want to talk to them about after.

Under that age, I'm prone to tell them they have to wait until they're older to see some of the things their friends are watching. According to any of my kids when they are around 12, I'm the meanest mom in the whole world.

With books its sort of the same and just depends on the book - some of them, I ask them to wait until they're a little older, some I let read probably at an age younger than some would approve of. In most cases, I'm familiar with the book and make my determination based on the book and the kid that's asking. They don't fight me so much on this - far less peer pressure to be reading the 'in' things, unfortunately. They voluntarily come to me with books and ask if I think they're old enough for it - they know that by 'old enough' I mean will they get the level of appreciation out of it that the book deserves. When it's a very good book that is too complex for them, I'd much rather they wait until they are ready to really savor it. Sometimes I tell them it's not quite ripe yet, and we've got a shelf of those waiting for when they're ready.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

David Grenier: Are you an idiot or an asshole? For a while I've been trying to figure out which and this statement just has me stumped. Either you're an idiot who can't understand why other people might find your loud swearing offensive, or you're an asshole who just doesn't care.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

My parents didn't use racial slurs much, if at all, and I don't remember hearing them from other kids. The issue just never came up. I led a pretty sheltered suburban life and I just don't remember when I became aware of racial terms. But I was a pre-teen in the 60s and eagerly read underground newspapers and comix, so I bet the first time I saw "nigger" was in a Zap Comic rather than somewhere it was being used as hate speech. Not that I'm necessarily defending Zap Comix use of the term - I recognize that as a white person I can't understand the depths of meaning it has for people of color.

My parents were very down on bathroom terms and "oh my god" type stuff. I share their distaste for the former but continued to use the latter with impunity.

Now I swear a lot, depending some on circumstance. I don't say "fuck" at work or around my mom, but I say it everywhere else. I might try to tone it down if I'm around friends and their kids, but in public, no. It's not my problem. I'm sure some people are offended by my language. I'm offended by things they do.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

A note: if you are a user who has been banned from this forum, please go away. If you are NOT a user who has been banned from this forum but you are quoting a post that was aimed at him because you think it's appropriate here, you should write to me post haste and convince me of that, before I add your IP address to my list of IP addresses I have banned because of the aforementioned banned person. In other words, now is not a good time for innocent people to be invoking the ghost of Dave Banned, because although I really don't want to smite the innocent, I might do so accidentally. Thank you.

I don't have any problem with the quotation, but I'm going to assume you're him unless you convince me otherwise via e-mail. Thank you.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001

I have a friend who teaches high school English in Vermont. Whenever a student uses a swearword, they are given the task of using a dictionary and thesaurus and coming up with a list of ways to say the same thing but without using swearwords or other "unacceptable" language.

So, it really becomes a vocabulary development exercise. There was plenty of invective in print prior to, say, 1960. Just dust off anything by H.L. Mencken, who would call someone, for example, an "autocoprophagous baboon" rather than an a--hole or s--thead. Now, maybe you wouldn't want your children insulting others, even using "clean" language. But at least they would be equipped to express anger verbally without using swearwords.

-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001

I try to keep my language clean in front of my kids. Like Lynda, I worry more about exposing them to violent images more than anything else.

The whole rough-language-in-a-public-place thing is tricky. As someone -- I think David Grenier -- pointed out, racist epithets are morally wrong and that's why they're never appropriate in a public place. But what about things that only offend some people's morality? Like shouting "Jesus Christ" in a public place? That's not just an issue about protecting the children. Plenty of adults find it morally offensive (for them, it's breaking the First Commandment). And what about noise pollution generally?

I don't think there's any clear rule. In northern New England, where I grew up, people tended to be quiet in and respectful of public places (other than bars, of course). Folks tend to speak soft-ish in restaurants and not to draw attention to themselves. Of course, we had no city-type parks tospeak of and plenty of private acreage to blow off steam.

-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001

That's it... I'm moving to Maine.

-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001

Although Alleline's observations about people's behavior in smaller New England towns are correct, I urge you to read the entire works of H.P. Lovecraft before moving to Maine, Morpheus...

I grew up in another small New England town, and I can tell you, the politeness of public behavior doesn't really make up for the ancient evils lurking in the hills, waiting to for their chance to destroy humanity.

-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001

Lizzie's post just reminded me that my dad swore like a trucker around us (except for the 'f' word), but he absolutely hated words like "fart" and "turd." I think even "poop" was a bad one. I hate those words, too.

My mom didn't even like us to say "darn" for a long time because it's just "damn" in disguise. But now she swears too, although like my dad she leaves out the "f" word, at least around the kids. (The adult kids, too.)

One time when Jeremy and I were on vacation with my folks, when he didn't really know them very well, he said "cunt" in front of my mom and I just about died. I was sure she'd never heard that word, because, you know, she's my mom. We'd all been driving all night through Oregon, and we stopped at a Denny's at about 2 a.m., and the waitress was incredibly rude to us. She kept talking to me like I was four, very blatantly bitchy. It was like she knew me personally and I'd slept with her husband or something. Very odd.

Anyway, Jeremy said she was a cunt, and I smacked him and told him not to say that word in front of my mother, and my mother smacked me and told me not to hit Jeremy, because he was right about the waitress.

(He was. But he didn't need to say it in front of my mom!)

-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001

Damn -- er, darn -- Beth, that sounds like a Jerry Springer show waiting to happen!



-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001

I tend to agree with the "What about the adults?" sentiment that Lynda expressed. I do try to watch my langauge when around children, but I really do like to go to places that are for grown-ups only. I like children just fine, but I don't have any and don't always want to have to self-censor or adjust my behavior in some way just because kids are around. Children don't own the world, and not everything has to be inocuous.



-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001

My view on children and language is that if you want to prevent them from hearing anyh word, you have to stop them from saying it first.

Sometimes I think that adults really can't remember anything from their childhood, at least about what their normal, ordinary life was like. I've had that suspicion since I was a kid myself, noticing all the ways which adults try to boss "us kids" around while ignoring what we thought were legitimate concerns. I decided then (grade 1 or two, I think, maybe older) to make an effort to remember what my life was like, so I can make informed decisions when I grew up. Not just the events, but how I feel about it all.

I don't know if that made a difference or not, but I did remember. I remember how casual swearing was all over the schoolyard, among other things. It wasn't considered "adult" - quite the opposite, we felt we were somewhat superior because we could express ourselves openly, at least when there was no-one around to punish us, while adults didn't seem to have this ability. They avoided those words like they were illegal, like they'd get in trouble if they said them.

Of course, so would we, if the adults caught us. So the only thing that taught us was to deceive the adults - the idea being that what they wanted was not to hear us saying those things, it didn't sink in that that language was bad by itself - not by that point. It was already casual by that point among most of the kids that age - to recognize it as bad, you have to learn that *before* you get used to it. Same held for other adult-supressed topics later, like sex or drinking.

This is a broad generalization, of course. Not everyone participated, but even those who didn't, I suspect, felt much the same way. Later, many of the kids around me assimilated the "bad" idea, but still not as something bad for themselves, but bad for others.

I've always thought this "bad for others" idea was the height of egotism. That you can be so special that you are immune to the immoral corruptions of the world, but all others are pathetically weaker than you, so must be protected.

Kids included. Kids especially, according to many opinions. In complete ignorance of the facts - that being that the kids probably feel the opposite, more or less. Poor adults, not allowed to swear for fear of punishment...

Even ignoring the idea of "harm", which seems non-existant, two other reasons given are that it teaches them not to use that language in public (uh huh...), or that it's just "inappropriate".

The first, obviously, is completely irrelevant. Anyone can be rude and offensive without resorting to swear words. The issue is you want your kids to be polite. They can be polite no matter what words they know. Anyone can. The entire point of a volcabulary is to have all the words that you need, at any given time, to express yourself completely and accurately.

Myself, I try to be very precise and accurate about what I say. I always have, more or less, and I've never developed the habit of swearing without deciding that that is precisely how I want to say something, that it conveys not only information but the emotion I want, and all the social context that the word implies. Swear words are very good at conveying social context. So are racial ones, and other perjorative terms. That's why gays are comfortable calling themselves fags, and my wife calls herself a wop. It grabs a whole bunch of social baggage, and flings it back, making it impotent in many ways.

But I digress.

The second reason, the word "inappropriate", is merely an euphamism for "my opinion". It just adds its own social context of "...and everyone else agrees with it". It abrogates responsibility for having that opinion, implying that you merely picked it up from the overwhelming morality that surrounds you, and you really have no choice but to recognize its true-ness.

While in reality, it's nothing more than an opinion, at best being one that its holder *may* have heard expressed by one or more others, somewhere.

What it comes down to, I suppose, is the entire question of adults worrying aboout kids and appropriate language is really adults deluding themselves that they have a responsibility, and have any sort of effect that they control. In actual fact, I don't think they have either.

-- Anonymous, August 02, 2001

Okay, does anyone else find that when you've been reading a book, your speech patterns start to imitate the book's style?

Well, I first attempted to read *Huck Finn* when I was 9. At the time I had no idea that n****r was a racial slur. I'd heard the word before, and I was offended by racism and everything, I just hadn't made the connection that the word was only used in racist contexts; I just figured, the whole book's in dialect, it's the dialect version of negro.

So later that day I'm talking with my mom about something, and, without thinking, I made what seemed like a very innocent comment...

I didn't actually get punished or anything, but as horrified as I was after my mom explained what the word was, she didn't need to punish me.

The interesting part of this is that today I swear like a pirate - "fuck" and "cunt" mean nothing to me, despite growing up in a home where I wasn't allowed to even say "shut up" - but I WILL NOT ever say that word. I can't even bring myself to type it.

-- Anonymous, August 04, 2001

Well, I think the problem here is that people these days are so selfish and immoral that God forbid they would have to "watch what they say when children are around". For Pete's sake nobody is saying you can't carry on your own conversations but must one yell out "fuck" in a bowling alley repeatedly etc...? Geez, it seems like a little decorum is in order. Ya'll just want to let it all hang out eh? I have a child and I SEE where this world is heading...through her eyes...and let me tell you...it is to HELL. Figuratively speaking of course. I do not get it. As a parent, I have an innate need to preserve my child's innocence as long as possible. I feel that is just a mother's instinct. If it's not then you should NOT be a mother. Nobody respects the little children and you will find that they do not respect you. Not that anyone here cares cuz you all view them as pests anyways. Goodbye.

-- Anonymous, August 08, 2001