Thursday, June 12, 2008

Unfortunate Side Effect

I say "gosh" quite a bit now. This is mainly due to my effort to remove all references to a Christian belief from my vocabulary. The thing is, as I'm sure my fellow non-believers can tell you, you do not realize how much "The Lord" and "God" and "Jesus" and "Holy" are all part of our regular collective vocabulary. Even non-religious quasi-theists are regular mentioners of holy things, or so I've noticed.
So the first to go was "bless you". That's a no brainer, but for years I felt some kind of obligation to say that out of kindness. Now, after not saying it for a couple of years, I still feel like a dick when someone (mainly a chick) sneezes and I say nothing. I would like to submit alternatives to "bless you" and "gesundheit" (which is just silly sounding, no offense to Deutsch land), such as "shut up" or "cover your mouth".
So now I'm saying "gosh". Not "oh my god" or "god!" or "good god", etc. I will hold on to "god dammit!". That one is just too powerful, and it is kind of fun. Think if you really had the power to command an omnipotent super-being to damn anything at your whim. "God, go DAMN that. Now". "YES MASTER".... It would be like walking around with a Hulk you could command to go smash things (yes, I'm excited to go see the movie and it's leaking out in my writing... sad).
So, there are my harmless and cute observations about not uttering references to my former invisible buddy in the sky. Maybe if I stop bothering him by uttering his name, he will find time to stop Chinese earthquakes, tornadoes in the mid-west, floods, genocide... you get the point. The Christian god is on the rampage, and we all going to hell on his watch.

4 comments:

caiuscamargarus said...

Neil, I don't see why you'd have to remove all Christian references from your vocabulary. At the very least, I think it will be impoverished, and at worst, you'll sound kind of like an asshole. The words "bless you" have lost a lot of their religious connotation when referring to sneezing, not to mention that the reason for saying it is a long-dead superstition, and it's mostly just a matter of common courtesy. You'd also lose expletives like "Jeez", "God!", "Holy Shit!" and so on, even if you do keep "God Dammit". Then there's the figurative use of heaven and hell, angels, saints, devil, messiah, prayer, etc. Not to mention great words like apocryphal and apocalypse. Conversely, you can think about how Christians said things like, "by Jove". Plus, you'll be committing a lot less blasphemy if you stop saying those things, and you end up saying hokey things like "gosh". There's so much good religious vocabulary that has gotten co-opted. It would be a shame to stop using it.

Neil Phalanx said...

I see your point, caius, but I feel that saying "bless you" makes me a bit of a hypocrite. To say I will remove all religious influence from my vocabulary is, obviously, a futile exercise. I would be breaking that rule daily. I guess I single out "bless you" for its silly superstitious connotations and because I never have felt that I possessed the religious authority to bless any person or thing. I don't know that purposefully blaspheming makes things any better, but I'm alright with that. To summarize, I don't regularly reference the tooth fairy or superheroes because they are not real, although they are ingrained in our culture. "Thank Superman!" Oh, and thanks for sort of calling me an asshole. Seriously, any feedback is good feedback in this format...

Mojoey said...

I cannot get past god damn it. I have some kind of mental block. Stub a toe - god damn it. Drop a class - god damn it.

I don't think I can fix it.

Diego said...

Hi! I'm from Argentina (South America) and here we say salud! when someone sneezes, which is something like wishing good health to the other.