(tandem cable railway - Zagreb)

As soon as I figured out the wording for this thought, I had an afterthought: “What happens when the other person gets off?” – Crash landing.

We all seem to recognize that “put downs” and “zingers” are hurtful, but they remain all too common in our conversations and jokes.  There is no doubt that television and movies play a role in making cheap-shot humor seem acceptable.  But, then again, slavery used to seem acceptable in our country.  That changed because some people had the courage to speak out against it.  So, maybe we can make “put downs” disappear from our communities as well.

How can we get the people around us to stop making hurtful jokes?  As things turned out, the day before I was planning to discuss this saying, I made a joking reference to one of the student’s planned vacation.  As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I heard a quiet “Ouch” from another student across the room.  It hit me like a blow to the stomach and stopped me cold.  When I included this incident in our class discussion, the students had the same gut reaction.  We had discovered an effective technique for stopping their friends from hurting each other with jokes: The power of a simple “Ouch.”