#69 - Pooped

Pooped

9/7/05 (#69)

Since the birth of my daughter, a new word has come into my vocabulary. Not a new word, actually---I have long been aware of its existence, but I have steadfastly refused to include it in my lexicon, as I have always found it to be both descriptively vague and (more importantly) phonically unpleasant.

The word is Poop. In any form: Pooped. Pooper. Poopy. (Or the exclamation, "Oh poop!")

I have always been mildly disgusted by the use of any conjugation of that word. Always. I recall a first date that I had 20 years ago during which my acquaintance described how a particular series of events left her feeling "poopy about everything"---a grown woman using the word poopy to describe her mood. Had we been in a restaurant, my response would have been an emphatic, "Check please!" As it was, we were in the car, and I spent the rest of the night dreading she would utter the word again. Had I been able to speak the word myself, I would have bid her goodnight by saying, "Well, I had a real poopy time." But I couldn't, in part due to courtesy, in part because I did not want to have that word, in my own voice, ringing in my auditory memory.

I have no idea how the word became so loathsome to me. Perhaps it was an early childhood event, embedded in my subconscious but out of reach of the examinations of logic. Other words have picked up peculiar baggage based on their context: I have a very clear memory of the first time I snuck a peek at a Penthouse "Forum" letter, in which a woman wrote that she "had no qualms" with the act that the letter's protagonist was endeavoring to perform, and ever since, "qualms" has had a vaguely sexual overtone to me. Perhaps there was some poopy event in my childhood that forever scarred my interpretation of the word. I am not grossed out by the concept---I'm fine with shitty, and crappy, and...well, I guess that's where my synonyms run out...but there has always been something particularly disquieting about poop.

But you can't be a father and hope to get by without using that word. Early on, I resisted, my wife mistaking the wince that my face made in response to the phrase "We need to change that poopy diaper" to mean a disgust with the act of changing, when in fact it was merely a knee-jerk reaction to semantics: a soiled diaper, a dirty diaper, a full diaper, I could change all of those; a poopy diaper made me want to wretch.

Being a parent and trying to live in a poop-less world is as hard figuratively as it would be literally----few other parents have this particular linguistic phobia, so I was forced to confront my fears brutally, like an acrophobic being dangled by his ankles from the rooftop patio. Grandmothers, aunts, neighbors, doctors---I felt bludgeoned with this second-tier four-letter word, like someone who didn't like "the f-word" being forced to sit through a Quentin Tarrantino film marathon.

The ubiquity of the word brings to mind a familiar old juxtaposition of ideas: Poop is often used because it's not right to say "shit" around children, but the hierarchy of acceptable words has always been a mystery to me---watch an R-rated film where the f-words are bleeped out and you know without hearing them what was intended: "Listen, you piece of BLEEP, you BLEEP with my sister again and I'm going to chop off your BLEEP BLEEP!" The actual phonic of the curse is unpalatable, even though the sentiment survives completely in tact. For me, poop was a bleep more offensive than the word is disguised---the subterfuge wasn't fooling anyone.

Eventually, I became sufficiently desensitized to hearing the word, like a person who has witnessed so many T.V. killings that bloodied bodies are viewed as little more than plot devices. The phrase "poopy diaper" is simply too efficient to be replaced by a less vile sounding phrase: I tried "the systems analysis on Sage's digestive tract has once again yielded positive results", but corporatese is never the recommended jargon if you want to get something done; "Steph, our daughter has crafted fresh excrement" is technically accurate, but when you have a toddler, that phrase might be mistaken as an announcement that we finished an arts and craft project; I briefly toyed with putting a literary spin on the scenario---"A foul wind doth blow"---but stopped when my wife replied, "Then changeth the damn diaper, Shakespeare." Thus, I resigned myself to embrace the enemy, and allowed it a brief entry in the glossary of my life.

(Though I still refuse to use it in the same sentence as "qualms".)

©2005 wpreagan