If you eat a bad word, what happens? Do you end up with word vomit or diarrhea of the mouth?
I’m not sure if this is actually the case or not, but I do know that a couple of bad words have come out of my mouth over the course of time. I’ve argued, fruitlessly, with people regarding my philosophy on cussing – every now and then, it’s therapeutic to drop an f-bomb or substitute tears with swears. Am I right? Who knows? Does it feel better? Hell yes!
Ultimately, I admit that over time I have found interest in keeping my speech rating down to the PG level – but there was a time when I sounded like a scurvy pirate with an endless supply of Captain Morgan. Honestly, you couldn’t convince me that swearing indicates a lack of education or that you have a small vocabulary, because I don’t have a small vocabulary; I simply have a flair for the euphemistic vernacular that so colorfully and vociferously illustrates my tendency toward irascibility and agitation. Trust me, I am always sure to equally and unequivocally express those ever-desirable moments of sheer ardor when I experience them, too.
No, the reason I have tamed down the frequency at which I excessively expedite expletives is simply so I don’t alienate – and, rather, do ameliorate – my audience. However, I will warn you – if you’rearound when I accidentally break something or hurt myself, you’re going to hear about it. I promise not to dose myself with a maligned helping of mental ipecac in the presence of anyone with tender ears. From now on, I have vowed to talk like a Disney movie – without all of the sub-contextual sexual innuendo meant to keep the moderately educated, easily amused, carnal minds of parents entertained while sitting through yet another animated movie about an underdog animal whose mother (and maybe father) died, thus forcing said underdog to overcome evil (embodied by an ambiguously flamboyant super-villain boisterously driven by inexplicable malevolence) and save the world/achieve impossible heights of love and happiness and live happily ever after. No, I will keep the innuendo to a minimum (locker room humor has never been my forte).
I just want to say one more thing about cussing and then I’ll move on to the next topic. This has to do with the use – by my fellow members of society – and substitution of nonsense words for commonly used swear words. Examples of these are: “shiz, dang, shut the front door, sonofabeesting, etc.” These words may not be listed on the FCC or Motion Picture Association of America’s databases of taboo words, but they still evoke the same emotional response from the listener and invoke the same contextual outcome. When you tell somebody (and why we feel it necessary to announce this anyway is beyond me, but…) that you have to go to the bathroom, no matter how you word or phrase it, you are still saying the same exact thing. Perhaps this is not the best example considering the subject matter. I do know that The Bible has several swear words in it. One of the tamer ones – actually a phrase – is “pisseth against the wall.” Clearly conversations about excretion have been occurring since at least the days of Moses, and I’ll hazard to guess it’s been much longer than that. These conversations are used to purvey specific grammatical, contextual, syntactic, sympathetic or otherwise philosophical responses that we as humans take in, digest and spit back out in some other way, shape or form all in the name of communication.
So what does this all mean? I think it means that in the name of communicating effectively, some of us have stifled the flow of ideas by declaring that some words aren’t fit for airspace. Ultimately, I think that words are words. Why do some words make people cringe or result in the speaker achieving a certain level of societal opprobrium? I haven’t the foggiest. I will say, simply, this. Nobody’s perfect; but if you can speak it, spell it and put it in a proper sentence that forms a complete idea, then what the heck? Go for it!
Whitney Afterdark 