Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
The other day a very angry man called me the awful word that must not be spoken, which women especially detest being called.
Later, I wondered if I would have even started our little fight if I hadn’t already had an intractable construction problem that morning followed by leaving Jiffy Lube without my new tires installed because I needed to go buy lug nuts, which, honestly, was just too much for me on that day.
It’s amazing what can push you over the edge. For me, it was 20 lug nuts.
So, I returned home and took our dog Russell for what I hoped would be a cleansing, calming walk while my son went to buy the lug nuts.
And that’s when I saw a guy in a pickup truck yelling at a woman who was at the stop sign in front of him. She had to wait. The guy behind her honked and big-arm-gestured at the woman who had no choice but to not drive out into the middle of a line of cars.
“Hey!” I yelled. “She can’t do anything. It’s not a four-way stop!” And that’s when the guy called me the awful name. He instantly pulled out the nuclear bomb of swear words, which I found a bit funny because it was so unimaginatively over the top. I just couldn’t believe we reached that stage of name calling so quickly.
What’s left to say after you say that?
Later, of course, I thought about a whole lot of funny things I could have said – zingers.
The wedding dress that’s been worn by our family for generations
But I also wondered about words like “ding-a-ling” and “nincompoop.” Do you remember those words? My husband and I brought them back into our vocabulary a few years ago, as a kinder, amusing way of expressing frustration.
“He’s behaving like a ding-a-ling,“ we might have said. Or a nincompoop. Or, what about that Scalawag and his cockamamie plans? There’s also lunkhead and fopdoodle. Then we’d laugh at how funny and cute we were being.
See how gentle that all is? It also creates a little burst of affection for the person you’re a little bit mad at. It’s difficult to be truly angry when using the word ding-a-ling, or other classics like smarty pants or bossy boots.
I wonder what the man in the truck would have said if I had replied: “Oh yeah? Well, you’re a smarty pants and behaving like quite the young ruffian!”
Maybe he would have laughed, or maybe he would have been afraid that he’d insulted the Biggest Weirdo in the World, and who knows what was going to go down next?
Which brings me to my name. Can you imagine if the guy in the truck found out the woman yelling at him to behave in traffic was called Karen?
I can’t adequately express the chilling effect the whole “Karen Thing” has had on my willingness to ask for the manager, comment on social media, provide my name on a phone call to any service provider, introduce myself to someone new, order a coffee or remind someone that the lowest price is the law.
There’s a Facebook group for the quite-nice gym I belong to where everyone complains about everything. Class sizes, volume of music, new instructors, old instructors, people who leave hot yoga early, the availability of pickleball courts, parking and so much more.
Almost all of the time, those not currently complaining call the current complainers Karen. I have not yet had the courage to complain about this, for obvious reasons. And honestly, I think it’s up to the caring non-Karens to point out the problem with making a somewhat common name one of the worst insults (but not the very worst!) around.
I’ve learned to love admitting I’m from Biggar, Sask.
I’ve had lovely people tell me, “But you’re not a Karen, Karen.”
But this doesn’t actually help. It just plays into the myth.
We all know there are good Karens because it’s just a name that was clearly quite common back in the 1960s. But, in 40 years or so most of us will have died off and there will be very few Karens roaming the earth, feeling uncomfortable.
What if we just stopped using other people’s first names as insults?
And what if we didn’t say the worst thing as the first thing?
We can still call out people’s ridiculousness, but we can be more civil, creative and even adorable when doing it. Pull out some of the old insult chestnuts like doo-doo head, bird brain and, of course, silly goose, and see what they feel like. I’m guessing they would have a de-escalating effect. There are also seasonal favourites, like “cotton-headed ninny-muggins,” which I try to memorize every time I watch Elf.
It matters how we talk to each other, even strangers, and about each other. We don’t have to be such nashgabs and meany-pants.
Karen Stiller lives in Ottawa.