Bossy Boots

In case you missed it last week, several extremely wealthy women have decided to boss the rest of us around by advocating the banning of the word "bossy" in reference to little girls.

The idea behind "Ban Bossy" is to address the pressing issue of girls not seeking "leadership roles" out of the fear of being labeled "bossy". You mean, that's all we had to do with Hillary Clinton? Call her "bossy" and she would have demurely walked away? I wished we had known that sooner.

The COO of  Facebok, Sheryl Sandberg, has teamed up with the Girl Scouts to launch a campaign, complete with commercials, urging us to ban the word "bossy" from our vocabularies.

The commercials feature celebrities like pop singer Beyonce Knowles.

I find it interesting that Beyonce is concerned about the power of words considering her husband Jay-Z, has become a millionaire and a very important person by referring to women as "bitches" and "hoes".  I assume that is not a compliment.

Beyonce has a new song out and supposedly it empowers women, which is a big thing in pop music.

When I was a teenager, the song "I Am Woman" came out. It said "I am woman, hear me roar in numbers too big to ignore". Women were soon empowered all of the place, mainly by wearing halter tops. At least they were in East Cobb, where I grew up.

Here are some lyrics from Beyonce's new song,  "Partition". It makes "Afternoon Delight" sound like a Shakespearean sonnet.



Took 45 minutes to get all dressed up
We ain't even gonna make it to this club
Now my mascara running, red lipstick smudged
Oh he so horny, he want to ****
He bucked all my buttons, he ripped my blouse
He Monica Lewinski all on my gown

Yep, that's the kind of person you want determining what words to use.

It is not clear how this word will be banned or what the punishment will be if someone utters this "B-word" to a little girl. I have a feeling shaming will be involved. Someone in the future will be "written up" and given a good scolding.  They haven't even come up with a word to replace "bossy". Do we say, "Stop being so assertive"?

You'll probably see articles in The Huffington Post stating if only Eva Braun was bossy, maybe Hitler wouldn't have killed so many people. There will be tweets on Twitter noting that Rosa Parks was bossy and it freed her people.   The possibilities are endless because while this generation can't change a flat tire, we sure can come up with new ways of condemning people.

When I started my working life, I worked with people that smoked at their desks, like they do on Mad Men.  Then, they were told that they could only smoke at the loading dock. (By the way, this was where all of the great office rumors were shared.) Soon some companies stated that you couldn't smoke at work at all.  It is like Cedric The Entertainer's line about "You can't smoke on Earth, no more" was proven true. All that happened within 25 years. So culture can be changed.

At least in the smoking situation, you can make a compelling argument there was a health risk involve. Here it just seems like people not liking a word which before last week seemed to be just another adjective. Yet, the entertainers are okay with 506 F-bombs dropped in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Peggy Young Nance said, "They rail against patriarchy and claim women and men are the same, and yet they seem cowed by an innocuous word".

Sometime when it comes to our culture, I wish I could roll up the partition.