wabrams:
These:
http://www.soul-flower.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/LBL008.jpg
You know, the Grateful Dead bears, or as my dad called them acid bears.
Cool. I didn’t know.
The only experience I had with GD was in 1980-1981 I was strolling around whiling away an evening between a two-day job interview in Pittsburgh, came upon a concert and went.
There were a lot of people dressed very interestingly, and the place was thick with pot smoke – the police tried to reposition themselves to stay out of the heavier drifts of smoke. I was the only one I saw dressed in a black business suit, wearing a London Fog overcoat.
If I recall, the warmup band was Seals and Crofts, and the only song I recognized was “Summer Breeze.” I don’t remember anything GD played, because I didn’t recognize it. The concert was seemingly endless, and after a couple hours I finally left to get some rest before morning. The fans (“Dead Heads”) clearly loved it, though, and many of them stood up and “danced” right at their seats during the show.
OK, so I guess the point is that if I saw those bears outside of this thread, I would not have thought about the grateful dead at all, while clearly other people would have immediately identified it.
Like other words and symbols, they only have common meaning if they are agreed upon in advance as to their meaning. Each person brings his own experience/baggage as to what that means. With that in mind, not only the literal “meaning” of the word may vary, but the “flavor” of it as good/bad, or whatever.
When a person responds to vulgar language by becoming offended, then it must not be the first time they have heard that language. You only get to damage the innocence once; then after that it’s a matter of how they react.
Personally I think the most powerful way to defuse naughty language is to give it zero emotional content, clear down to our most inward levels. People can talk how they want and I won’t get upset because again, if I’m offended that shows that I’ve heard these words before and obviously I lived through them. It is the emotional energy these words bring that gives them their negative power – not the particular sounds of the utterance. In fact, people occasionally mistake something innocent for something rude – thereby creating negativity where none is intended – and all this because we are on a hair-trigger for being offended.
With that I’d like to interject that whether swearing is OK or not, that becoming agitated and offended when other people swear actually feeds negative energy into the situation.
One time I had an engineering supervisor that was a staunch Christian in a rather bizarre church (Harry/Henry Armstrong’s – Worldwide Church of God) but I gave him credit for living his faith as honestly as anyone I knew. Anyway, we had one coworker who was pretty foul-mouthed and the rest of us were not; our boss would never use rude or offensive language, but nor did he flinch when the coworker used it. It was a lessen to me in how to communicate without judging.
Alan
said- It is scandalous only if someone else hears it… St Paul quote is one of my faves.
) “introduced” me to casual usage to the extent I am also comfortable saying it only around certain people who all talk that way.
