Say What?: When did raping become a good thing?

I've learned a lot about English since I've moved to Wales (and who says Americans don't understand irony?). Along with the obligatory lessons in hilarious trans-Atlantic homonym-based humour, I've also had some sharp lessons in the use of words that I took as being benign which really - if you look a little more closely - are really quite offensive in origin.

Exhibit A: 'spaz'. Now, back in my day, it was OK to call someone a spaz. I was little or no different than calling them a wally, geek, nerd or dork. Then, was so well-accepted, I'd argue, that it's been enshrined by the bastion of 70s and 80s comedy, Bill Murray, in the 1979 classic 'Meatballs':

I mean, in the US, there's a line of lip-balms called SpazzStick, an energy drink branded as Spaz Juice ("all the energy you need to annoy everybody else"), and a Transformer named Spastic. All of these seem normal(ish) in the US now, and it definitly wasn't an issue in the halcyon pre-PC days of my redneck childhood.

But the first time I called someone a spaz in the UK, the people I was with looked at me as if I'd just called MLK a nigger. 'You can't say that!' they said, in unison. 'Why not? He's a spaz!' I replied, incredulously. Turns out, they were right. In the UK, The National Spastics Society (now called Scope) was founded in 1951 to look after the needs of people dealing with cerebral palsy. So calling someone a spaz here was a big deal. Dunno... maybe it's now a big deal back home, too. But the point is that there are words that vary in meaning, where the 'sting' of the original meaning is either diluted or intensified by the mitigating factors of time, location, maturity or culture.

Which brings me alarmingly to another bit of evidence which might suggest that I am, despite my best efforts, getting older: when did raping something become a good thing? On Facebook today, a young man I coach posted a screen shot of a computer game score of which he was particularly proud. The caption read 'Raping'. And I thought...eh?? So I posted back: 'Is that meant to be a good thing?'. What followed was an unintentionally condescending explanation of the use of the word in 'modern talk': 'to do something violently and in a way to show absolute destruction of something. E.G. "I absolutely raped in this game." lol.'

Now, THAT definition of 'raping' doesn't sound too dissimilar to what I had in mind. Is it my 40(ish) years making me overly sensitive, and not allowing language to evolve? Is it my fatherly instincts exhibiting themselves with such a visceral reaction to the use of that word in such a casual, even positive way? Or is it a legitimate concern to think that a word that is so intimately connected to something so horrific is now just 'what kids say'? Probably, definitely, and hopefully.

I guess I just think that some words are just too laden with subtext to have their meaning changed so dramatically. And I guess I'm a little saddened by the thought that someone could say that they raped something, know what it 'could' mean to some people, and still be OK with using it. I think that it's kind of like me deciding that I don't mean what YOU might mean if I call you a kike, or saying I 'totally molested that dude in a game of darts'. Me deciding that subtext doesn't matter doesn't eliminate the connotations that people might have with certain words, and although I don't feel as though we should be overly dramatic about the impact that our words might have, I do think we need to be aware of our audience. 

And maybe, in truth, that's exactly what I need to remember here: the 19-year-old young man who bragged that he 'raped' his video game probably didn't have me in mind as his audience. And he's probably right.

But still...raped? Really? C'mon Generation Next: you can do better.