JoannaLove asks: What do you think about bad words?
I don’t speak with words, I bark. But I definitely use bad language at times. Like when I see a squirrel or a dog I don’t like outside my window. Or, worst of all, a cat! Oh do I use nasty language then!
So it would make me a pretty big hypocrite to sit here and tell you never to use bad language. But I will make one suggestion: Be sure you’re willing to pay the consequences when you do use it.
For example, if I bark my worst at some dog walking by, and then I should suddenly find out that he’s not on a leash, and he didn’t care for what I said, I might find myself suddenly on the losing end of a very unpleasant experience. Or if Handsome is peacefully napping, and I suddenly hear a cat two blocks away and decide that that cat needs to hear what I think of her, Handsome is likely to get very angry with me, and might just “accidentally” forget to give me dinner that night!
Where I see kids (and some adults) get in trouble with bad language is that they don’t use it correctly. Walking around all day using this word and that to show how tough you are? It doesn’t work. It makes you look dumb, as if you can’t think of anything cleverer to say. Calling your teacher or your mother a bad name? Okay, that’s really dumb. You’re going to get in lots of trouble, and you haven’t really accomplished anything for it. And if you use bad language all the time, you’re going to accidentally use it at a time you really don’t want to. So my advice is to use it very sparingly. Just when you need to. You know, like when you see a cat.
Oh one other thing. I remember once, Handsome walked into the street to talk to someone who was driving a van, and they stopped at exactly the point when a wheel was on top of his foot. And it hurt, a lot. And Handsome wanted to tell them that they needed to pull forward just a bit, to move the wheel off his foot. But he couldn’t say that. He couldn’t do anything but keep saying one very bad word, over and over! I mean, he couldn’t say anything else!
For me, it was hilarious. But for him… well, I’ll bet he wished he’d been able to say other words!