19
Jul
What the Bleep?
by Ashley Thill
0 Comments | Posted by thatgirl in All Dolled Up, Living Life, Making Waves
Image courtesy of Blogs.sundaymercury.net
I make it a point to watch award shows when they’re on TV. I tune in to the Emmys, Grammys, Golden Globes, People’s Choice, Oscars, you name it. So naturally, I watched this year’s MTV Movie Awards. I like to see this more casual show where stars aren’t so uptight and can be fun and silly. One thing that shocked me this year, however, was the amount of bleeping needed to cover the swearing. It was a lot even for MTV. None of it really added much to the show. Peter Facinelli, who stars in the Twilight movies, also made a point of mocking this during his cast’s acceptance speech for Best Movie. Although the speech was mocking the use of swear words, it actually rang true for how we have incorporated these words into our everyday vocabulary.
Why do we swear? There are lots of reasons really. The Association of Psychological Science published an article with this question in mind. The article stated that we swear in order to express our emotions. We swear when we’re happy, sad, angry, frustrated and more. It also is a way to relieve pent-up emotions. We feel a genuine release by throwing out a naughty word here and there.
Yet it seems we’ve grown so accustomed to these words that we just randomly interject them when they are not needed. Even for things that shouldn’t elicit a larger-than-life curse word, people seem to drop an F-bomb. Most of us usually just swear in social situations where we are comfortable with the people present, but if it becomes a bad habit, it could slip out in front of company we don’t want it to.
So how can we stop these nasty little words from intruding into our everyday conversation? First, we need to recognize in what situations we are saying these words and how often. Then comes the tough part of actually noticing and stopping ourselves. Some tricks to break bad habits include substituting the behavior for something else. We can train our brain to use new words in place of nasty ones. We also can learn to express and articulate our feelings in a more appropriate way.
It seems like it’s time to reverse our trend of cuss words in everyday conversation and return to more refined ways of speaking. Instead of using these words in every-other sentence, we should challenge ourselves to see how little we can use them. We can have meaningful conversations that allow us to express ourselves without all the four-letter interjections. Let’s leave the bleeps out.