For those of you who truly know me, you know that my language is less than pristine. So when we were told to write about something important to us for an Advanced Composition class, this is what I came up with.
Because I'm a master of the four-letter variety, I know when it's acceptable to use them. So fret not: I was conscientious of my audience when I wrote this.
~
On Swearing
So I'm at my friend's house. She's only one I know here, and now she's nowhere to be seen - she invited my in and walked out the front door with somebody else. And I'm sitting on the couch by myself, about to get up and walk back to my dorm. But her housemates are there. And they ask me if I want to play LIFE.
They don't bother to ask if I've played before, even though I have - they just launch into explaining it.
Because I have never played like they play before.
You write down your life story while you marry and divorce other players and weave through life's little celebrations, like "sex change," "get hired as a stripper," "have illegitimate children." After I get married to Kadie and switch seats to sit by my new "wife," I see the "sex tape" tile on her side of the board. And I can't help but splutter, "What the f--- is that?!"
I have been welcome in their house ever since.
~
I grew up around "bad words." Not from my actual family - I didn't hear my dad swear until I was ten. But between John Wayne, country music, and "A Christmas Story," I had a vast (if not practiced) repertoire by the time I entered middle school. I could "shit" and "damn" my way around a barn like nobody's business when I was only fourteen. At first I reserved "the big one" for special occasions, like when I charged barefoot into the English Channel and remembered too late that French sea water is coooooold in mid-January. At nineteen when I cut my bangs to cover my eyes and shoved eight studs through my ears, I started using it on a daily basis, more times than I could count. Now there's no telling what'll spark it: breaking my pinky toe on the lawn chair by the pool, realizing that my flash drive is completely empty, discovering there are no more Reese Cups in my secret stash.
It just makes you feel better.
~
The fact is, no one really knows where "bad words" came from. The great literary deity William Shakespeare often gets the credit, but the "mother of all dirty words" appeared in print two hundred years before Shakespeare was born - 1475, to be exact, in a poem attacking Cambridge monks. While it was originally "a graphic euphemism for the act of copulation<" World War II soldiers gave it new meaning, new weight. Even today, swearing is largely associated with the military because of its apparent link to bravery, toughness, and courage.
"F---" has been taboo since the late Nineteenth Century - the editors of the Old English Dictionary were faced with a serious dilemma when it came time to print the "F" volume in the mid-1890s. It was omitted from most written publications well into the Twentieth Century, as most people considered it "unprintable," "best avoided altogether in polite company." Though the realm of "polite company" is being stretched by modern evening television programs, you still won't hear it on TV nearly as much as you would in a pool hall because broadcast media are actually under threat of fines if they don't fuzz it or bleep it. But when it does slip, "polite company" still sniffs, "How vulgar, how common, what a lack of education."
~
Look, I get it, we all do: it's still not culturally acceptable. If you stand in the food court in a mall and scream a four-letter word, you'll get stares. You'll get comments. You'll get mothers ushering their children away with their ears covered and glaring in your direction. "How dare you corrupt the pristine mind of my precious child, your filth will drag him into a life of immorality."
But that's the thing of it: I can rattle off words that would deck a nun without a flush in my cheeks or tingle on my tongue. But my integrity is alive and well.
"The mouth of a sailor, the morals of a lady."
There is no correlation between bad language and a bad lifestyle.
~
Swearing is universal. Billy Connolly says everybody understands what it means, from the jerk who just cut you off on the interstate to some numpty messing with your suitcase in an airport in Tibet.
Swearing is cathartic. When you smash your finger with a hammer, don't tell me the first thing that fills your mouth is "Oh dear, the searing pain, how gruesome it is."
Swearing is binding. It is the hallmark of blue-collar workers who construct intricate tapestries of profanity to create solidarity against "the man."
Swearing is definite. It is the truly educated who know never to use a paragraph when a single word will suffice.
Why would we condemn words that create community, solidarity, catharsis, unmistakable meaning?
~
At the same turn, why is it our go-to to use the words that have been called "offensive" and "vulgar" by our society?
Maybe it's our mission to "say what we mean." I've been told for years never to use ten words when one will do - why clatter through a paragraph of politeness when "damn it all to hell" is how you feel?
Maybe it's our inner desire to be rebels. My ma told me I didn't sound like a lady when I swear, now I curse in Received Pronunciation.
Maybe it's our drive to appear tougher than we are. My language fits my punky bangs, the punctures through my ears. "Don't touch me or I'll punch you back."
Maybe it's a combat technique against our crippling insecurity. Maybe I take my glaring eyes, my sullen face, my unruly hair, my shredded fingers, and hide them under a tarp of "shit."
Not "look at the girl with the jiggly frame."
"Look at the girl with the sailor-mouth."
~
I belonged when I dropped the "F-bomb" in the middle of a LIFE game.
I joined "the team" when I clattered into the loading dock at work "f---ing" and "damning" our common hell.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe it's just that first-grade yearning that never really leaves us:
To have a seat at lunch,
To be part of the game,
To fit.
