Hanging out on Christmas vacation with my kids I’ve learned many things. I’ve learned a new (to me) slang term that I’ve begun to use and so should you.

Stink Eye (n) - a facial expression of doubt, distrust, or dislike; a dirty look; skunk eye, the hairy eyeball. “When that dude cut me off I gave him total stink eye.” [Doubletongued.org]

“Stink eye” should not be confused by Stinkor; an action figure from the 80’s. I owned him as a kid. He was simply amazing.

“Stinkor was first introduced in 1985 as an action figure from the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe toyline and came packaged with a mini-comic titled The Stench of Evil. The Stinkor action figure had a semi-foul scent, giving it the distinction of being one of the few toys whose “action feature” is an odor. “[Wikipedia]

I’ve been hearing lately some people cursing in creative manners. From youth, I’ve heard “what the f!” When James (my 5 year old) gets mad he says, “Oh pickles!” While walking down the street the other day some lady dropped something and said, “Criminey!” Others like to call upon ‘Jesus’ at times when I’m sure they’re not praying. So what exactly is profanity, vulgarity or cursing?

Wikipedia describes profanity as:

Profanity is “the quality or state of being profane” . It can also relate to using profane language, or desecration or disrespect toward an object of religious veneration. It can be a word, expression, gesture, or other social behavior which is socially constructed or interpreted as insulting, rude, or vulgar.

All of this creative cursing amuses me, but raised a question. Does it matter if we use specific curse words, or is it simply the intent behind a word that makes it vulgar? I’ve seen Samuel (my 2 year old) get mad, throw a temper tantrum and begin to spew all sorts of angry syllables and sounds. If I could understand or translate what he’s expressing, I’d say it was some sort of toddler vulgarity. So I think that profanity can be defined by both intent and specific taboo words.

What do you think?

I was reading a movie review this morning and ran across the word: zeitgeist. I had no idea what it meant, so I looked it up and found something interesting. Learning a new word is good thing, but this was a really interesting word.

zeitgeist (n) - the spirit of the time; the spirit characteristic of an age or generation.

So it led me to ponder this question, when considering youth ministry/culture…

What would you say is the zeitgeist of this generation?

[WoD Challenge: work this word in to casual conversation today and tell us how you used it in the comments area.]