I teach an eigth grade class. Today, I used the word ‘crap’ while in a class. It may not be the most polite word in the lexicon, but there are far worse alternatives. I was upset with a student who had brought candy into the class and had left a trail of candy wrappers all over the hall and classroom…being the day before Easter break, every child had candy in his or her pockets, and it was very disruptive.
Anyway, a security guard overheard me and tattled to the office that I was “cussing”. He did not say what word I used, only that I was “cussing”. The principal even asked me about my alleged “profanity”, and I did not even realise he was asking about my use of the word “crap”. I thought I was being accused of some hard core swearing.
I am more bemused than angry, I am not ranting. I am just curious, is ‘crap’ that obscene? Maybe I am just jaded by years of exposure to stronger words. Would anyone be too upset if their 14 year old child was exposed to such language by a teacher, especially if they were making an absolute mess of the place?
And why do coaches get to say whatever they @&*!ing please? They use real profanity all the time.
See, I grew up being taught that “crap” was the word you said when you wanted to be inoffensive and not swear. Then, about a year ago, I saw a rerun of Freaks and Geeks on ABCFamily (might have been FoxFamily then, I don’t remember) in which the guidance counselor said “crap.” They silenced it out! Huh? So instead of people waking up and realizing that being offended by a simple word in an otherwise inoffensive context is downright stupid, they’re actually moving in the other direction and making more words taboo? How depressing.
Well, duh. If it’s good for the team, it’s good for the school. Gotta support the team! macho grunt
I’ve always said “crap” when trying not to be obscene.
When I was 13, I was over at a friends house, and they had a pet bird. Pet bird flew over to my shoulder and took a shit on me. I said
“your bird just crapped on me.”
He gave me the big
“Dude…shuttup…my mom is in the next room!”
I asked him what he was talking about, and he told me that “crap” was a swear word in their house. They weren’t religious fanatics or overly conservative in any other way.
It struck me as odd, and I have never met anyone else who considered “crap” a swear word.
For me, it isn’t that bad a word, but it’s not good either. I’ve noticed that schools are a sort of ruffled section on the time space continuum, lagging about ten or twenty years behind the rest of the nation on these sorts of things. Yes, a lot of the kids hear fifty times worse than this from their own parents, but we teachers can’t allow anything potentially offensive to fall from our lips. Since it sets a good example for the little boogers, hopefully encouraging a world were there’ll be peace and harmony and birdies singin’ with never a naughty word to hurt a tender heart, I don’t mind keeping the word crap out of my classroom vocabulary.
When I was a kid, I couldn’t say crap, fart, or pee. But when my sister and I became teenagers, my mom was more lenient, and we could use those words. But it’s not until we moved out of the house that I could say damn, hell, or shit without my mom having a coronary. However, she WOULD still have a coronary if I said the “mother of all dirty words”. But my dad wouldn’t care. He was in the navy.
crap is definitly not an obscene word. Many like to consider it so because of its association with defecation. That association though comes from the name of the man who invented (i think, maybe just manufactured them) the flush toilet, Thomas Crapper.
I had the misfortune of letting ‘crap’ slip in class when I was in the sixth grade, and my teacher promptly called my parents. I would describe my dad’s reaction as ‘bemused’. I was amazed that anyone cared at all – I hadn’t even realized I’d said anything wrong until a few seconds later, when the teacher started yelling at me. I can’t believe anyone cares about crap like that.
When I was growing up in a middle-class home in the 1970s, “crap” was not a word you used around your teachers or parents. Nor was the word heard on network broadcast television in the 1970s.
BTW, the noun “crap” goes back to Middle English, centuries before Thomas Crapper, and was being used as a verb too by 1846, when he was a lad. It’s a funny coincidence that a man of his name designed toilet fixtures, but it’s not the origin of the word “crap”.
I don’t like the word as a word, simply because it doesn’t have a pretty sound (yes, “shit” sounds nicer, and I’d rather hear it, go figure), but I certainly wouldn’t consider it a “cussword”. Methinks your janitor has issues.
'Course, I used ALL kinds of language around various students at one time or another. I think I even said “shit” in class one day, and didn’t even realize it until I noticed some of the boys mouthing to each other, “Did she just say ‘shit’?” I nearly died of embarrassment, but of course they LOVED it and never let me forget about it.
For those of you who weren’t allowed to say the word “crap” at home or school, did you ever get in trouble for using the word in reference to the dice game craps? It’s kind of like how, as kids, we could say “dam” if referring to the type that holds back water but would get in trouble if we said it as “damn.”
I once had a teacher in the eighth grade say “bullshit” in class. He was an otherwise nice teacher and I never had any problems with him, but one day he lost his patience with someone and he said, “All right, cut the bullshit!”
I, too, wasn’t allowed to say crap, shit or pee, and fart was pushing it. We’d get our mouths washed out with soap for those.
Peri - We didn’t feel it was necessary to explain what bodily function we needed to perform in the bathroom. If we needed to go, we’d just say we needed to use the bathroom. If a puppy went on the floor, he “piddled” or “wet” or “had an accident”. If we had to refer to feces, we used the word poop.
I never thought of ‘crap’ as an obscenity, yet have always disliked the word because oddly enough, more than ‘s***’, it connotes the original meaning of the bodily function. If I hear the word ‘crap’, I think of smelly bathrooms and the acts of voiding and wiping oneself clean. I don’t know why I have that take on the word. Does anyone else? While when someone says ‘s***’, it seems more in a figurative sense, as it were.
‘Same s*** different day’ is so common and unoffensive these days it hardly registers on the Offense-O-Meter. But if someone said ‘Same crap different day’ it would bother me.
