Saturday, September 02, 2006

Offensive Toy

I just bought an educational toy for the kids yesterday. I'm teaching Eva to read, so I've been looking for resources to help us along. Anyway, this toy actually sticks to the fridge by magnet, and has a bunch of magnetic letters that can be placed into it to make 3 letter words. It actually teaches the child to sound out the word and then pronounces the word if it is a real word. It really does help. Then I read in the instructions that it would not pronounce offensive words, which I hadn't even thought of up until that point. So of course, I became intrigued and started putting different letters in to see what would be considered 'offensive'. Can anyone guess where this is going? The word 'GAY' was pronounced (and that's fine since it is technically a word with an inoffensive meaning) and the word 'GOD' is apparently too offensive to be spoken out loud in the presence of children. Go figure.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jules:

I find the word "God" offensive when spoken out of context. I have several co-workers who constantly use the word (since our revenue has recently plummeted) and I, for one, DO find it offense.

Now, would my kid necessarily say it in an offensive way? …maybe; maybe not. We do own a TV, you know.

That’s my two cents. Let me know when I have enough for a cup of coffee.

Mandy “Rock the Boat” Snider

jul said...

You crack me up Mandy. Only you could have thought of that, ok maybe Shawn could have. I appreciate your insightful comments.