Just Words.

Recently I heard a young, female TV news anchor, realizing she had made a mistake, say "My bad". First time I had heard that expression and it took my brain a moment to wrap itself around the unfamiliar phrase.

Then there was the TV commercial for canned beans in which a talking dog recognizes that it has unfairly accused its owner of being an imposter and says "Sorry, Jay. My bad."

About the same time, on a TV news program, the panel was discussing yet another politician who had screwed up, but they called it "mea culpa". The generally accepted English translation of that Latin phrase is "through my fault" and represents a formal acknowledgement of personal fault or error. In everyday English: "My fault - I did it". But, those are words most politicians find it impossible to utter, so they use the old Latin term. Not only that, but they tend to say "a mea culpa" as though it were a noun. Like the mistake was something that slipped up from behind and bit him on the backside. That makes him more a victim and suggests it wasn't really his fault.

Saying bad things in someone else's language never sounds very bad.

It reminds me of being in the Philippines at the end of world War II. The Filipinos had taught English in their schools ever since the U.S. acquired the territory around the start of the last century, so all young Filipinos spoke English. But they were not taught vulgar American slang. We 17 & 18 year old enlisted men, (often as irresponsible as any teenage American boy) delighted in teaching them the most vulgar expressions, to which we assigned a more innocuous definition. We thought it hilarious to hear nice young people "talk dirty", with the most innocent smiles on their faces.

And there were the Japanese POWs. There were hundreds of thousands being held at American military facilities around the Pacific. The Japanese economy could not yet absorb several hundred thousand more unemployed young men, so we were "rationed" as to how many we could send home at a time.

If you are thinkling of heavily guarded prison encampments, forget it. The shooting war was over, Americans and Japanese were friends, and the 10,000 POWs held at the facility where I was stationed had free range of our base and performed much of the work. It was their choice - anything to break the boredom of just sitting around, waiting to go home.

Many of these former Japanese soldiers spoke rudimentary English, and again we eagerly taught them vulgar American slang. It was always good for a laugh, especially when they repeated the obscenities to an MP. A second laugh often followed when the MPs, weary of hearing insults they knew had originated with an anonymous G.I., rebuffed the Jap's intended friendly greeting and chased him away.

But, back to the present. I love "My bad" as expressed by our current generation of American youth. Not quite so edgy as "my fault", but more honest than mea culpa.

Now I just keep hoping I will make a mistake, so I can say "my bad"! ;-)