I use the word crap often, so often can’t help writing about it. Lately I’ve been dealing with a lot of crap. My life is so full of crap I should have waders.
I like words – at least some of them. And I like sounding them out, you know, as in phonetics. I even like onomatopoeia which is a pretty neat word in itself – if you can spell it. And then there’s alliteration… You might say I like how the sounds of words resonate as they spew their strident spilth across dissonant pages.
But the word “Crap”, doesn’t sound good at all. It’s sound is almost as bad as its connotations. I admit it is versatile – it can mean the same thing in 80 different languages. But it has no shimmer – not that I’d want to see crap with a shine to it. And being monosyllabic, it’s short, with an abruptness that makes you want to avoid it, to look away, or maybe find a shovel…sometimes a really big shovel.
“Crap” is ubiquitous and versatile. What emotion or state of mind it implies depends on how you say it. We make nonjudgmental and noncommittal references about things we don’t care about or no longer want, like crap. We nonchalantly say, “Someday I’ll have to clean the crap out of this drawer.”
Describing a quantity of crap may require special verbiage because the word crap itself does not indicate quantity. Instead, we make additional declarative comments like, “I can’t get in the garage.”
Crap often pairs up with dislike. We can talk about crap that we really dislike as in, “Look at all that stuff!“ Add some laziness and you can turn a molehill into a mountain of crap.
Crap can be many things. It is something we have more than enough of and don’t want any more of it. According to the Law of Conservation of Matter, crap may be neither created nor destroyed. Especially when it’s a collectible, keepsake, or memento. So we keep accumulating more…
Crap can stink. like crap which is garbage, dog doo… A “Who did that?” or an eye roll or a snarled nasal sniff says that you have just made a crappy discovery. Probably under your favorite chair or on your bed. Add “Oh God! WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?” and we pretty well know what it is and who did it.
Crap is also another person’s bad attitude and It’s even harder to deal with crap when it comes from a significant other. In a behavioral context it implies nastiness on the part of someone else and is often addressed with fecal imperatives, as in : “I don’t want any more of your s__t. I’m tired of your crap.” More hostility can be added by saying, “You are so full of crap.”
Bad life events and troubles are crap. Some of them are more appropriately described as crap than others. Like an overflowing toilet. Not only will you have aggravation and disgust, but the plumber’s bill will also add more crap to the unpleasant issue at hand (or on the floor).
Conflicts and other personal predicaments can accumulate over time, like crap piled higher and deeper. But not to worry. It is possible to adopt a more optimistic attitude about crap and “decrapify”. So the next time I am up to my neck in clutter and I want to lighten up, I will “decrapify” both my head and my the house. I will dump my junk – at a garage sale.
