Is Butthurt a Bad Word?

(image via wikimedia)

I never put much thought into the word butthurt.  Butthurt is kind of recent.  I never said it as a kid.  I’d never even heard of it until recently, and if I’d never heard of butthurt when I was a kid, then it must not have been a thing.

But butthurt is a word now. I’ve heard adults and kids say it.  I can’t believe adults say the word butthurt, but I guess it’s been around long enough for opinions to have been formed about it.

I overheard somebody at work respond to the word butthurt by saying that butthurt was homophobic.  I wanted to eavesdrop, but conversation just shut down after that.  I didn’t even have to enter the room to kill the discussion myself (I have that talent).  Nobody in the room asked why butthurt was homophobic.  Instead, I eavesdropped on uncomfortable silence.  Nobody at work, including me, wants to be homophobic.  Even the guy who said butthurt got shut down by the accusation of homophobia.

Even though I don’t want to be homophobic, I don’t want to be a chump either.  I don’t want to limit my vocabulary just because somebody has made up a reason to be offended.  If a word is offensive, there has to be a logic behind it.  Emotion alone shouldn’t make a term offensive.

Since I can’t get fired from my own blog, I’m going to try to figure out butthurt.  I always thought (when I thought about it, which just started maybe a couple days ago) that butthurt meant a person had a stick up his/her butt, that he/she was cranky or whiny.

Having a stick up your butt would hurt.  A stick is rough and can break skin, and a jagged edged stick could shred the skin in the sensitive area pretty bad.  I don’t have to experience that to know it.  I have imagination.  A person with a stick up his/her butt would be sore, grouchy, and in a bad mood (at the very least).

I t makes sense to me that butthurt is just a shorter version of stick up his/her butt.  Or maybe it means that the butthurt person had just been spanked.  Either way, being accused of being butthurt wouldn’t have been meant as homophobic.

I don’t know.  Maybe it’s homophobic to think that butthurt is homophobic.  Why would somebody assume that only a certain group of people would be butthurt?  Anybody is capable of having a hurt butt.

It’s not the first time I’ve disagreed with others about a word’s offensiveness.  I don’t think crap should be a bad word.  I don’t think the phrase “throw like a girl” is sexist.  I don’t think hell is a bad word either because it’s a place, and a lot of people don’t believe in it anyway.

I’ve never used butthurt because it’s kind of crude and if I’m going to be crude, I use the classics.  But nobody over the age of 16 should say butthurt.  I think it’s okay for kids to say it because the word butt is okay and hurt is okay.  It wouldn’t make sense to forbid a kid from saying butthurt when those two words are okay by themselves.  Besides, you have to give kids something they can say.

Butthurt might not be a bad word, but it sounds stupid when an adult says it.  There’s a local sports talk show host who uses the term for anybody who disagrees with him.  For one thing, I don’t think anybody cares enough about his opinion to get emotionally worked up to the butthurt stage, so I stopped listening to him.

To be fair, it wasn’t just butthurt.  He did/said a bunch of immature stuff (shocking for a sports talk host, I know).  I’m not boycotting him because he says the word.  I’m not calling all his sponsors and demand they stop advertising on his show.  I’m not telling him not to say butthurt.  I’m not plugging my ears, screaming really loudly, and rolling on the floor in a fetal position (doing all three simultaneously is kind of tough).  I just stopped listening.  And now I’m writing about butthurt.

The sports talk show host probably wouldn’t care that he lost this one listener.  He’d just say that I was butthurt.

*****

What do you think?  Is butthurt a bad word?  If so, what am I missing?