Another 'Catter of the female persuasion checking in...

I agree with everything Clinton Hammond said here! Words is words.

Some words are meant to be offensive to those with more fragile sensibilities... but my feeling is that "bad" words lose their power when used in bawdy songs. The words are over-used in the songs, people laugh when they sing along with the words, and the tension is released. The only people who are left offended are those who refuse to accept such a song as a tension-relieving device and instead insist that the song promotes "unacceptable" behavior (in other words, they make the choice to allow themselves to be equally offended at the behavior of saying/singing the words as they are offended at the behavior of committing an act such as copulating with one's mother).

I was raised by some easily-offended people (by fundamentalist Christians -- augh!!). So I was taught to react to "bad" words with disgust and to substitute words that were somehow "less bad" (heck instead of hell, shoot instead of    , darn instead of damn, etc.) even though the definition of each "less bad" word was the same as the "bad" word. But when I grew up and started thinking for myself, I made a conscious decision not to do that anymore. Of course, the result was that I offended those of my friends whose sensibilities were more fragile than mine, and I had to make another conscious decision to avoid using certain words in certain situations.

The debate here seems to be whether THIS situation (the Mudcat Forum's threads page) is one in which we need to concern ourselves with others' fragile sensibilities, and to what extent. In the case of John Melberg's thread title, John didn't CALL anyone a mother    er in his thread title; his thread title simply listed the name of a song that has the word "mother    er" in it. To me, that makes a huge difference. To me, it means that John's intention is to discuss what he considers to be a traditional folk song, and not to be offensive. So I don't see the word as having the power to offend in this case. IMO, those who allow themselves to be offended at seeing the title of a song up for discussion need to learn to skim over thread titles in which they have no interest. (And those who worry about their children reading "bad" words in the titles of songs up for discussion at Mudcat need to monitor their childrens' internet activity and have a discussion with them about not giving power to "bad" words.)

Furthermore, if John did not use the entire word "mother    er" but instead inserted hyphens as he has in this thread's title, would it not be more difficult for people interested in the song to find his thread with a Forum Search? Don't you need the actual title of the song as a proper keyword for such a search?

SharonA

P.S. -- I am accessing Mudcat today from a public library in the US, and the word in question was not filtered out by the library computer's filters, nor did I have any problems opening www.mudcat.org/threads.cfm or any other Mudcat page. I often use library computers, and I find that many potentially-offensive words in my OUTGOING email messages are filtered out (including "girl", for whatever reason). Now, let's see if I can post THIS message without any words being filtered out! Here goes...