What Do iPads, Teabaggers, and 'Beavis and Butthead' Have in Common?

I'm already weary from the pushback about the name Apple gave its latest techtoy.
If you're just back from a visit to Uranus, the new computer tablet is called the iPad. From pretty much the moment that Steve Jobs revealed the name Wednesday morning, the jokes started. A few of them are funny:

"I'm waiting for the version with wings."

"Will the iTampon be smaller?"

"Is the 64 gig version the heavy flow model?

As if "pad" hadn't existed before marketers glommed onto it for women's products. Some etymologists track the word back to the 1500s, taken from an old German word for the sole of the foot. Other meanings – something soft, a bunch of things grouped together, a place to live – accreted over the centuries like barnacles.

Shin pad. Mouse pad. Lily pad. Pad of paper. Bachelor pad. Launching pad. Legal pad. Brake pad. Sketch pad. Heating pad. Ink pad. Memo pad. Brake pad. Pad Thai, even.

Should all of those phrases go away because some ad guy switched in the euphemism "sanitary" for "menstrual" in "menstrual pad"? I think not.

Which brings me to Teabaggers. When folks who were upset about Obama's victory decided to hitch their image to the Boston Tea Party, they came up with a modern item to replace the boxes of tea tossed into the sea. And far as I can tell they were the first to describe themselves as "Teabaggers." Why not? It's easy to remember, rolls off the tongue, fits in a headline.

Turns out, as we now all know, that some people use the word for a particular sexual act. Once that news got out, lefties smirked and righties bloviated about how insulting it was that the lefties used the word.

Show of hands here: How many of you had any idea that there was a sexual use for the word "teabag" before you heard about the "controversy?" That's what I thought.

So if we discover that the same folks who "teabag" also use "eagle" to describe a sex act, does that mean the Eagle Forum will change its name? What if crack dealers "do a patriot," whatever that might mean? Does that mean we can't use that word?

"Beavis and Butthead" was a cartoon series that ran during the 1990s. (You can find the videos all over the Internet.) If you've not seen it, the main characters were a couple of really stupid teen boys. And one of the running gags was that they'd laugh -- a really annoying, sniggering laugh -- at any word with a hint of sexual connotation: Wood, job, whatever.

I bet Bevis and Butthead would snigger about iPad and Teabagger. I'm just surprised that so many people want to appoint them as head arbiters of modern English.

(I said "head." Heh heh. Heh heh heh. Heh heh heh.)