I remember when we were young, a game of Smear the Queer could break out on the playground at any time.

One moment you were playing a friendly game of catch, and suddenly someone would throw the ball at you and scream out, “Smear the Queer,” which immediately made you the target of a tackling mob.

You’d run as hard as your pride would take you, until you were either smothered or managed to toss the ball off onto some other sucker who was feeling a brief sense of invincibility.

It was a game of boyhood bravery with no winners and no losers, where the sides were simple to see, and you could easily choose which to stand on, to either get or get gotten.

But it was mostly just stupidity and boys being boys, something that we thought might separate us momentarily as men.

The rules of Smear the Queer were simple: one person was it, either by chance if the ball was tossed to them or by choice if they grabbed the ball from another or off the ground, and everybody else tried to tackle them to get the ball.

However, not once when I heard that primal call to action shouted out, “Smear the Queer,” did I look around for a homosexual to harass, nor can I even remember understanding the true nature of the name of our game.

It could be argued that the word queer is not being used in the derogatory sense in this instance, that it is simply used to signify the person who is “it”, who represents the unusual or different person in the less sinister sense of the word, the person who is suspect, and therefore, outside of the mob.

And it could also be argued that smear is not meant to indicate an attack on the character of someone or a slanderous defamation of their good name, but rather to cover and smudge a person as some friendly tackling will do.

But then why use the more vicious term Smear the Queer and not some more appropriate name with the same meaning like Smother the Other, and where did the name of this game develop?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but like many terms that have been used over the years in American society, the name of this children’s game is likely rooted in hatred and bigotry, not from the children who play the game, but passed along by adults and somehow coined into the name of a playground pastime.

There are many examples of these terms in our lexicon, including “Indian Giver” (one who gives something only to take it back with obvious negative implications against Native Americans), and “Yellow” (a coward or traitor with suspect origins in the early American hatred of asian immigrants).

These terms get used at first in hatred, but then get adapted over generations until they end up being accepted terms that are used in everyday English by children that don’t know any better, who are taught by ignorant adults.

Of course, we hope that one day these children mature and realize that words have meaning, and that they will decide to no longer use them for communication, but culturally ingrained hatred isn’t good for our development as a community.

I’m reminded that this game still exists by my cousin, whose two boys were recently playing Smear the Queer with their team after a football practice, as the coach had literally told her.

When she told the other parents who were waiting for their kids that they were just playing a quick game of “Smear the Queer,” her words were met with outrage at the use of such vulgar language.

Funny enough though, none of them stopped the game until the boys were good and tired, and they really didn’t object to their boys either being tackled by a mob or joining a mob to tackle a single child, but just thought it was an inappropriate name for a game.

Even so, I can’t imagine too many parents explained the meaning of the name Smear the Queer to their children on the way home, but it’s probably better that they allow their children to live in innocence a little longer.

God forbid one of them might think they were actually being attacked for who they are and feel that they were no longer just part of the group playing the game.

On a major network special covering the effect that global warming is having on the melting Andean glaciers, a local farmer was quoted as having asked the following question:

“Why are the mountains crying?”

His metaphor is poignant, comparing the melting glacier waters rolling down the mountain slopes to human tears, inflicting the sadness and frustration that often results in crying.

In a detailed program that revealed all of the facts and figures of global warming and the retreating glaciers, which threatens the water supply of this region, this single metaphor was more powerful than any image, interview, or scientific evidence.

It may only be that as a writer, I am more open to accepting the emotional significance of a metaphor than others who were watching this program, but in a very real sense, I believe it represents the power and influence of poetic language in our modern society.

With all of the statistics, survey results, scientific theories and their rebuttals floating about, it’s sometimes hard to understand the meaning of our world from an emotional perspective, which is really the mechanism by which motivation is inspired and change eventually happens.

Raw human emotion purified into palpable communication is the essence of poetry, and in that sense, poetry is alive and prospering in the words we hear every day, despite the meager sales of poetry chapbooks in local bookshops.

Whether it be Barack Obama’s eloquent words on racism that serve to inspire our country or the manipulated fragments of advertising copy that internalizes our unknown desires for products we didn’t know existed, poetry is everywhere, even if it goes undetected, and it’s as important in the world today as ever.

Originally published by The MAG Zine (themagzine.com).

Multiple meaning words spread throughout the English language reeking havoc on the substance of sentences.

Homographs, or words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, may or may not have different pronunciations, which adds even more madness to the mayhem.

Are English speakers just too lazy to invent new words, and if not, why do we settle on saying the same thing for different purposes?

Actually, we haven’t stopped inventing new words, and it is estimated that about 25,000 words are added to the language each year.

In fact, the English language may have more words than any other language. Putting an exact number on the amount of words is difficult, but the Oxford English Dictionary includes over 600,000 definitions.

Not including the various parts of speech and other variations, there are about 175,000 words in current use and about 50,000 obsolete words.

Words with multiple meanings are also not just an English phenomenon, as all languages have multiple meaning words, and many of the tonal languages such as Thai use multiple meaning words extensively by varying the meaning of the word through the tone of the pronunciation.

However, you’d think with all of the new words being invented each year and the vast vocabulary of the English language that we would eliminate some of these multiple meaning words.

I don’t mean to be mean, but let’s consider the irony of some homographs.

Hippies long to wear long overalls and burn incense, but problems never incense their overall mood.

Living in the present is no minute present after you die, but rolling the die each minute is easy when you’re young and not worried about making a living.

It’s easy to spot the point of this article, but difficult to point to the spot where the point was made.

With so much confusion caused by these forged double meaning words, it’s time we forged ahead with inventing some new words for the English language.

If we can’t agree on new words to replace the most common homographs, let’s just eliminate using either of their meanings altogether.

For instance, I propose that we eliminate the word console by putting our electronic equipment on a shelf and comforting our loved ones in times of crisis.

In addition, instead of desert, I suggest we simply abandon our dreams and ambitions and refer to an endless beach with no surf, where you obviously won’t be able to surf, but at least you’ll know where you stand.

Homographs may have their place in the English language, but that place seems to be molded by deceit and confusion, and it’s time to disregard the laziness of our English-speaking predecessors.

Double meaning words, homographs, or indolent sloths, whatever you choose to call words with double meanings, can only cause confusion in a world that is becoming ever more specific in its communications while at the same time less detailed in its meaning.

Originally published by The MAG Zine.

In today’s highly-educated society, it’s impossible for modern fiction authors to know more about any one subject than all of their readers, and this has resulted in the decline of realism in modern literature.

It’s no secret that modern mankind is able to comprehend at levels far beyond any other time in history, as the spread of education has reached further in our times than ever before throughout history.

Aristotle is unarguably one of the greatest minds the world has ever known, but there are at least a million people living today who know as much about the universe and mankind than he ever did.

This is not to say that any living person has his capacity to calculate and comprehend the natural and human world around him, but as far as his actual knowledge base, there are many people living today that know as much about the world we live in as Aristotle did.

As a result of these advancements in education, the modern reader of fiction knows as much, if not more, than the modern author they are reading and the subjects they write about.

This closing of the education gap results in a virtual chasm between the actual facts of life and a convincing level of realism in modern writing, and this is truer now than it has ever been before.

In the pursuit of realism, authors must depend on the factual details of everyday life to create characters and situations that reflect what they write about.

For instance, a novel about the insanity of a serial killer may draw upon the scientific details of psychological disorders.

However, in today’s society, a thousand psychologists and criminal investigators know more about the mental make-up of a serial killer than any author could hope to achieve, let alone having the years of experience dealing with such characters that would be needed to portray their nuances convincingly.

Sure, an author may still convincingly write a murder story that will entertain the reader and satisfy the needs of the story, but any number of readers could point out various flaws and improbabilities based on the facts they know to be true as a result of their experience and education.

This begs the question of whether it is necessary to accurately reflect the scientific facts of life in fiction, as it is after all a creative endeavor, but if the job of literary realism is to suspend the readers within the illusion of reality just enough to transcend that reality, then it is absolutely necessary that the writer not allow the details of the story to distract the reader from the events they portray.

It could just be that the pursuit of realism in fiction is a dying cause, given the blaring presence of multimedia on society and the decline of fiction in general as a commercially viable social medium, which is slowly merging into literary journalism and eventually may be known only as news.

However, the final sanctuary for the “uneducated” fiction writer may be emotional realism, which corresponds with an age-old adage of writing – write about what you know – even if you don’t know what you’re writing about.

Even when the facts of human existence aren’t universally known, the human experience is often universal, and that human experience may be the last lifeboat in the literary ocean for the modern author.

The modern author may not know everything, but if they write about what they feel, then even the most educated of readers will pretend to understand.

Article originally published by The MAG Zine