YOU CALLED ME A WHAT?

Wetback.

What does that word mean to you? It meant the end of a promising radio career for a local talk show host.

Mr. Talk Show's repeated use of the word on the air to make a point, made a point. The point he made was if you say "wetback" on the air in New Mexico, you're fired. Whatever happened to "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never harm me?"

This episode got me thinking, why do some words bother us and others do not? Some Mexican-American listeners were bothered not at all by the "w" word and others were aggravated to the point of picketing the radio station. It can't be the word itself; it must be what that word (or any word) means to each individual who hears it.

So if you are in charge of what words mean to you, can't you choose not be hurt by them?

Maybe words bother you most when you give them some validity. When I was a public speaker, if some one approached me after a program and told me I babble without obvious direction, I might be bothered at some level if I felt that might be true. But if the next person came to me and told me my head was blue, being called a "bluehead" wouldn't bother me at all because I know I'm not one of the colorful Bluehead clan.

It's not only the word, but who said it. If upon leaving a program, a domicilly challenged person sucking Ripple wine out of a bottle wrapped in a brown paper sack told me he heard my talk while rummaging through a dumpster in the alley outside of my meeting room, and I "stunk" even more than the dumpster. I guess I don't much care. But if the "stunk" word was laid on me by one of my peers in the National Speakers' Association, I would exhibit a distinctly different reaction to the same word.

Words by themselves mean nothing. You give words all the meaning they have for you.

Maybe the power of words for good and bad in your life depends on your sense of self-esteem? The better you feel about yourself, the tougher it is to find a word to hurt you.


Lesson: When you're offended by a word, it says more about you than it does about the word.