The other night Mrs. Know and I were watching “Millionaire”. Among the little commercial promos at the end of the show was one for a game called “Fact or Crap?”. OK, sounds like fun…until they cut to the next shot…of a family with 2 small children playing the game. Mrs. Know’s jaw dropped to the floor, and I just remember thinking, “that’s just wrong !”
Query: Is anyone else uncomfortable with the concept of 2 little kids playing a game called “Fact or Crap?”–or am I just getting really square in my old age?
Strangely enough, University Games’ own website doesn’t list the game, but according to its Amazon.com description, the game is for ages 12 and up.
The dictionary.com/Random House Unabridged Dictionary lists “crap” in this sense of the word as “slang, sometimes vulgar: nonsense, drivel.” Seeing as there are no other terms I can thing of that represent falseness except the harsher “bullshit,” “crap” appears to me to be a tamer alternative.
Probably because when I was growing up, it was considered a profanity of sorts. Certainly not something you would utter in the presence of your parents.
Remember that even the mildest of profanities were considered socially unacceptable in the olden days. In 1939, controversy ensued over Gone With The Wind in the Hays Office over the famous “I don’t give a damn” line. When the film was re-released in 1971, it was given a G rating.
Well, it wouldn’t have been allowed in my house when we were kids, but we weren’t allowed to say “sugar” as a euphemism for “shit”, because clearly we meant “shit” in our hearts, no matter how we dressed it up. So, I doubt I’m a good data point. But certainly, if I were trying to raise kids not to use profanity, I’d count “crap” as profanity and that game wouldn’t be in our house.
(I have no intention of raising kids, and if I did have kids I’d want them to use the language to its most full and rich extent, so they’d probably have BBQ Pit vocabularies, but if I were trying to raise them profanity free…)
I have that game! Last time we played it my 8 year old wiped the floor with all of us. Basically, someone reads a statement and all the other players race to decide if it’s “fact” or “crap” and hold up their fact or crap sign. So all you have to do, really, is be the first one to hold up your sign; you’ve got a 50/50 chance of being right without even thinking about the question. It makes a fun drinking game, although obviously we send the 8 year old to bed first.