Hated Words

In a corner booth of a downtown Vancouver cafe, Rebecca Lamarre is musing aloud about the lingering effect her final project for Emily Carr University had on her communication style. "For a while, it messed up the way I was able to speak," she says, "because I was thinking about words the whole time -- I was worried I'd use the wrong word."

"I Don't Like the Word: An Investigation of Language Bias in Vancouver, British Columbia" is the Dadaist experiment the 21-year-old Lamarre devised for Emily Carr's annual undergraduate show. By placing envelopes at select locations around Vancouver, with an invitation for passersby to jot down their most reviled words, she hoped to prod respondents into clearing their linguistic detritus.

"I went with the negative because I feel like it's more important," she says. "I feel like if you get the negative out of the way, then you can decide what you really like. And it's also important to identify what you don't like and see how it affects you. If you ignore it, then it causes problems."

Lamarre first came up with the idea after filling a square in the Community Art Gallery's community art grid last year. "I thought it would be funny to see what kind of words people didn't like at an art gallery," she says. "I thought everyone would be really prim and proper, or they would try and show off and have really big words.

"But that wasn't the case -- it was all, like, 'fiancée' and 'visa' -- just regular, everyday stuff. I was really surprised -- my predictions were totally wrong. And so then I thought, 'I wonder what would happen if I put envelopes in different parts of the city, to see if there's any correlation between the location and the demographics that move through the space, the words that they don't like? Do people with higher education have more capacity for abstract thought? Is that related to income?'"

Universal loathing

What Lamarre wasn't expecting was that, from South Granville to Commercial Drive, from tattoo parlours to acting schools, almost everyone hated the same words.

Are you ready, Vancouverites? Your least favourite word is a tie between 'moist' and 'cunt' -- closely followed by 'panties,' 'hate' and 'no.'

"It's all to do with female body parts," says Lamarre, "which I think is really shocking -- I live a very sheltered art school existence, so I don't even think that it's a problem, ever, and then I go out into the real world and I [realize], 'Oh, people still really have a lot of issues with this.'"

Lamarre made a concerted effort to hit a variety of demographics in the locations where she left her envelopes. Capers, Starbucks and the Vancouver Art Gallery were all on the list, as were Buy-Low Foods, Banyan Books and Heartquest Wellness Centre. At some spots, her envelopes were stolen. At others, she was simply turned away. "I ended up being where I was allowed to be," she says. "I wanted to make sure I was legal about it the whole time."

No thanks, said public library

Public spaces, she says, were harder to tap into than commercial ones. At the Vancouver Public Library, her project proposal was sent to a committee for review. Three weeks later, the committee said no.

Lamarre thinks it would "absolutely" have been easier to ask about words that people do like. "That was one of the major questions," she concedes, 'Do you not like people? Do you hate the world? Are you depressed?' And I'm like, 'no!' And when I did it at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the stipulation was that I had to collect words that people did like first, and then I could ask them what they didn't like."

She discovered that words we do like include "horse," "mango," "chocolate" and "aurora."

Whether the words were positive or negative, some respondents related simply to their sound. Others focused more on meaning.

"The one that was the most distinct was the women's only gym," says Lamarre, "and it was all words like 'fat' and 'ugly' and 'stupid.' It was so depressing."

At a wellness centre on Commercial Drive, the word 'hate' showed up four times -- proof, says Lamarre, "that art is always political."

'Am I a freak?'

Little did Lamarre realize that her work also would thrust her into a quasi-therapeutic role. As a result of the project's web component, she observes, "I got this really long e-mail from this guy -- he said, 'I saw your website, and I think it's a really great idea and really fascinating. I was wondering, I don't know if I can ask you this, but I don't know if I'm weird, because I have words that I can't say, like "banana" and "mouth." I was wondering, am I a freak -- are there other people like me?'"

Lamarre hasn't quite figured out how to respond to that one yet, but she did get a thrill recently while quietly observing visitors to the Emily Carr show taking in her finished piece -- a collection of the reviled words, divided by origin, pinned to a board.

"It was fun just standing and just watching people looking at it," she recalls. "People would get really, really excited. [They would say] 'Oh, look at that word!' and they would giggle. 'Spatula,' people kept saying, 'why do people think spatula' is weird?'"

So what is Lamarre's least-favourite word? That would be "should."

"I don't like being told what to do," Lamarre says.

"I Don't Like the Word" was part of the exhibition Leave Room for the Holy Spirit, the off-site show of this year's Emily Carr graduates, which just wrapped at the Helen Pitt Gallery. More loathsome snippets can also be found at rlamarre.wordpress.com.

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