Blog / 2024 / You’re a Toad.

On this blog, I keep it to a minimum, but, in real life, I cuss. Sometimes a lot.

But, even when I’m in the zinger zone, so to speak, I’m still discerning. I stay away from gendered insults, like “bitch” or the c-word, because of the inherent violence of the patriarchy, and I avoid brutal imagery more generally too. It’s not that I think my words are magic spells—or at least not in a traditional sense of believing that, if I say something, it’ll happen. It’s just that I don’t want my words to mojo my mind, hypnotizing me into accepting violence.

So I may be a copious cusser, but I’m a careful one too, and that includes abstaining from using animal names as insults. Dog, pig, rat, weasel, snake, chicken, and even toad: all these (and more!) are off-limits.

After all, animals aren’t bad, and the idea that an unappealing, mean, stupid, or cowardly human should be compared to these creatures is a kind of violence. It cuts humanity off from the rest of natural world, and that separation is, to my mind, where a lot of our issues as a species comes from.

When we sever ourselves from other animals, we lose what should be an intrinsic grasp of how we fit on this planet. We become a kind of AI Alice, falling so far down the technology hole we’ve built that we can’t see how our very real bodies with their non-artificial kinds of intelligence already live in a sort of rabbit burrow. The Earth could be described as one enormous and intricately interconnected system of tunnels—human spaces intersecting and overlapping with those of other species, including toads.

Avoiding calling someone I don’t like a “toad” is a little thing. It’s not going to solve global warming or the myriad injustices that come from thinking ourselves better than others, but it’s a little thing I can do every day. So I do it.

I build a muscle for thinking about fairness and kindness on the regular. The toad in me acknowledges the toad in everyone.