October 30: $#*! My Dad Says

$#*! My Dad Says is a television series based off of a Twitter account. Apparently, the creator and author of the account was a 29-year-old man that lived with his 74-year-old father and he simply posted the various things his dad said on a daily basis. How they created a successful show from a 140-character count posting is beyond me and I've never seen it so I can't actually comment on the show itself.

While sitting through one of the countless promotions CBS ran for the sitcom during Surivor, I began thinking about how I could relate to the premise of the show. I don't know if either of your parents are like this, but my dad had a special saying for every day objects that he used with frequency in the days of my youth. Because he used the terms with such consistency, I grew to assume that these were the proper names. It wasn't until I got to junior high, though, that I began to learn the truth behind these "father-isms."

Thanks to my dad's quotes and my mother's refusal to teach me what the quotes actually meant, I went to junior high school calling my Chapstick "lip jizz" and my sandals "Jap flaps." I didn't know what either meant beyond what their connection to the product was. A car was a car and a tree was a tree. The balm that I applied to my lips was simply lip jizz. The thin slice of material that slapped the bottom of my bare foot was a Jap-flap.

I suppose in a way, it makes sense that my dad would use these terms to label these items, but how can you send your small, innocent child to school with cherry-flavored lip jizz in his pocket? How can you expect your child not to get in trouble with the Asian community when he's casually referring to his cheap, and poorly assembled flip-flops as a product of the Japs?

They call it junior high humor. Fart jokes and sexual innuendo-laced sentences. When a little boy arrives claiming to be applying jizz to his lips, he will eventually get ridiculed for it and so it didn't take me very long to start using a different term. The same thing happened when referring to my sandals.

Looking back on those terms, it's easy to laugh and brush them off. I'm pretty confident my dad didn't do any permanent damage to my psyche so I'm not upset by it. He still uses his convoluted vocabulary with regularity as though his words were real definitions to every day objects. It makes me wonder if the choices I make when referring to items will be hard-wired into the vocabulary of my children. After all, it's just $#*! my dad said.