Swear

I endured growing up under the authority of an angry man with a foul mouth. I was called all kinds of intentionally demeaning names. I heard the whole curse vocabulary of this father every time he got angry. There was the usual assortment, including racial slurs, and then there were the combinations that were conflated inventions. If I could hear it today, I might find it grimly amusing, in a mocking vein. Even then, as the target, after spending some time researching the meanings, I could appreciate and ridicule his stupidity and muddle. Small comfort. I took it all too seriously when he goddamned me to hell, and it cut deep when he called me a selfish brat. When he called me a son of a bitch, I hated it, but it rather rolled off the mark.

But my mother's reaction, to interrupt and correct him, excoriate his use of vulgarity, never worked. The violent opposite, as far as I could see. And by the time I was ten and checking the Scatological Dictionary at the library, she had been hearing him swear for well over twenty years without changing his habitual mouth.

Knowing my mother's extreme, and largely irrational, aversion, to any word impolite, made me hold my tongue very tightly indeed. She vocally and bitterly complained about any off color language in movies, and I could feel her cringe if a swear word came out in a social situation where she would never utter a reproach. She would not allow me so much as Crap, or even darn, if said with any real anger. My frustrations and any sign of it were not tolerated. I heard her say Hell once, and Damn once. I was shocked.

.

Mr. Novak talked about swearing, in ninth grade.

"These are powerful words, not bad ones. And as such, you have to treat them carefully. Obscenity is for obscene situations. Swearing is a reaction to powerful feelings. Control these words, it's not wrong to use them in the right conditions. It is wrong to use them all the time for everything, it takes the power out of them."

I'd begun to practice the words, swearing silently when alone and inside my head. This touched me, and relieved me of a great deal of guilt about learning the words. I vowed to know what they meant, and to use them consciously, and with intent.

By the time I was in college, I had gathered a reasonable vocabulary, though I still used cursing with some embarrassment. Nothing like a bunch of theater students to practice shouting out rude names. Except, of course, for Army folks. Obscene words for an obscene situation. I found myself, at 26, rather proudly in possession of quite the potty mouth. Partly because of the great flexibility of the f-word. (Fanfuckintastic, for instance.) My language became turbo charged and potent, surrounded by constant swearing. I think I needed it. I hated the choices I'd made, I hated what my life was becoming, I needed those toxic words to kill off the old assumptions, the old habits and fears.

And when I started toward nursing, working with elderly folks in a nursing home? That took some steely control to keep my language presentable, and not to shock nor dismay, nor get myself fired. After one of my Guard weekends, it was damn near impossible. I allowed myself "Shit," being knee deep in it. I know shit. I defend my right to say it. Being surrounded by very religious minded cow-orkers, I had to keep myself in clean words. I gained control over my own exclamations. I still do not swear at work, with one exception. (See above.) Well, and bugger, but that is because most Americans don't know what it means. I don't say it around our Brit surgeon.

My father, for all his years of practice, swore badly. I swear well. I acknowledge this inheritance, the anger, the hurt. But I grew my own cuss collection. I never use the term sonofabitch. I will never swear at anyone, nor damn anyone to anywhere. Color and culture are not fair targets.


The goddamnedpigshit fuckwits are.