What's in a word?

I don't care about the words fat and obese and never have. Truly. They're just desciptions or a medical condition to me. I don't even care if people say them to me in an obvious attempt to be mean. In fact, I actually felt BAD when I had to teach my little son that "fat" is a bad word that he should never use to describe people because it's very likely to hurt their feelings. I felt bad because I had to take away a layer of his innocence that day. He knew I was fat, and if "fat" is too bad a word to say about or to someone, then FAT must be BAD...therefore, his little mind obviously concluded, his MOM must be BAD. Before that day, I just treated it matter-of-factly, with no emotional connotations attached to the word or description. It was really nice during that time for him to think of fatness as just another way a person is, like someone who has brown hair or green eyes. It was a big "so what." But after I told him not to point out that someone is fat, he started whispering the word and looking guilty when he said it--he knew from then on that fatness is a negative thing. It's really too bad that we have to teach our children stuff like that because it really shouldn't matter, but it's the reality we live in. Y'know, on a related topic, my son showed me one day last year how much I don't care about how people look and how I passed that on to him. He was talking about a school activity and was telling me about a funny joke another boy told him. He referred to the boy by name, but I didn't know all the children's names. I asked him to describe the boy so I'd know which one he was talking about. He struggled for several minutes to think of something that would definitively tell me which boy it was (he was wearing a red shirt, but three boys were wearing red shirts; he had black hair, but half the class had black hair; etc.) Finally, he just pointed the boy out to me, and I had to laugh. He was the only black boy in the class! My son is so uncaring about a person's physical appearance--in this case race--that it didn't even occur to him to describe the boy as the only black student in the class. I didn't know if I should be pleased or worried! It's nice that he's "color-blind," but I worry that people will think he's an idjit for apparently not noticing things that are really pretty obvious. ---- Leslie