Update on quote of the day: Unless otherwise noted, I will be posting "bad metaphors" written by students in narrative essays. You can look these up on the internet. They're hilarious. I have a Word document - that's how much I love them.

Quote of the day: "Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster."

The Situation:

First of all, you need to know that my house is very near the beginning of a long and well-traveled bike path in my town. It rapidly drops into a steep hill that evens out quite a ways below street level.

So, I was driving home from school with my mom, and I saw this quartet of high-school aged kids standing at the peak of the hill. They were just, kind of... standing there, not really doing anything. There's a bus stop nearby, but not THAT close, so I found this very mysterious. I said, "Well, who are these hooligans?"

I guess since we're white and they were Mexican (though she would claim that's not the reason), my mom got on my case about how she's been doing this Bible study in the book of James (it's in the New Testament), and one of the things it talks about is not showing preference. Long story short, our for-the-most-part-good-natured banter continued well past the moment we walked through our front door.

The Response:

I wouldn't consider calling a group of kids my own age hooligans "showing negative preference." Hooligan is a fun word, and I would have said it even if it was my own cousins standing there on the bike path. By my mom's logic, it wasn't right for me to call them hooligans because I had no evidence that they were causing any trouble. So I pointed out that I couldn't call them nice people, either, because I had no evidence that they were being nice. And then, if you take it really far, you can't call them "people," either, because they could be aliens in the guise of people, like Dave Ming-Chang from that Eddie Murphy movie Meet Dave (very funny movie, if you haven't already seen it).

Okay, yes, that would be reductio ad absurdum. But you catch my meaning.

If someone called me a hooligan, I would not be offended. Why would anyone be? It's not like anyone even takes the word hooligan serious anymore. It's in the same boat as calling them a group of whippersnappers - except I'm not 80.

I don't know... I guess I'm back to my old, "Grow a layer of skin, people, not every word that comes out of another person's mouth is meant to maliciously rip you to shreds. And even if it is, you're better than that."

Of course, there's always the option that I'm just a blatant scumbag racist who wants all Mexicans sterilized, and all that is hiding under the thin guise of calling a group of high schoolers "hooligans."

The Question:

Is it offensive to call someone a hooligan? What would you do if someone called you a hooligan? Have you seen Meet Dave?