Cursing and Swearing

(Some bad words here, don’t read if you get easily offended)

I suspect when most folks read the title of this rant they will assume that I am referring to the use of bad words and profanity. You know what I mean: dirty bodily functions, sexual acts of one form or another, taking the deity’s name in vain, and that sort of thing. There is irony in this, of which it is sometimes difficult for me to get enough. We will have to forego the irony for just a while, however. Patience is thy own reward, as they say, so read on.

I have a difficult time being around people who are incapable of carrying on a conversation without saying fuck in nearly every sentence. They use it as an exclamation, a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition, and, sometimes it seems, even as a conjunction.

Oh my, I just had this memory of Sesame Street’s cartoon skit of Conjunction Junction as a clever way to explain how conjunctions join things together. The possibilities for clever repartee nearly overcame me.

Let’s get back to our friends and their limited vocabulary. Have you noticed how they are able to couple various forms of the F-word with many other words—don’t you just love puns sometimes—such as mother, butt, pig and any number of others. In the end, such people seem only capable of conveying a non-pejorative message by context and body language, the stream of profanity being nearly incomprehensible in its dearth of actual meaningful words. For lack of a better term, let’s call these folks the “Effers.”

It is not that I don’t use profanity myself. When I’m out with the guys hunting or fishing, playing golf, drinking and that sort of thing, I like to sprinkle an occasional f-bomb into my language for the added effect it gives. If used sparingly, the f-word can grab the listener’s attention or stress a point, and even express a certain delight in the subject at hand. (Gee, I can’t stop myself). My father occasionally uses cocksucker to express his poor opinion of a person. When he calls someone that, you know that he is having trouble finding any other language to express so succinctly and completely his contempt for the person. He would never refer to a woman with this word, even if he knows for certain that she performs the act regularly and with enthusiasm. I find that I adopted this little language quirk from him—perhaps it is genetic.

However, I try very hard to avoid dropping any of these language bombs when I am in public, around people I don’t know, men that I suspect don’t like hearing these words, and women (even though some of them are the worst Effers). I slip occasionally and use such language around my wife, but rarely, because she always gives me that look when I do. I think it is rude to assume that people don’t mind hearing such language. I think it is beyond rude, bordering on assault, to continuing to talk this way when it is apparent the audience is offended or disturbed by such language.

I’m all for freedom of speech. You have the right to say things that express your views, thoughts and opinions. You can even say things that you know some people would find distasteful or painful to hear. But, if all you want to do is stand in the middle of the room and in a loud voice spew words from your mouth like a toilet backing up just because you can, then you deserve a punch in that mouth to remind you which way the sewer is supposed to flow. One assault begets another, and yes, makes the second wrong right.

We could say that there are two kinds of Effers. The first are those who talk this way because they are simply ignorant and don’t know any better. They grew up in households or neighborhoods where most people around them spoke the same way. In addition, to be honest if less than kind or politically correct, these Effers are usually less intelligent and have difficulty imagining or contemplating that they could communicate in any other way. It simply never occurs to them, whereas a brighter more intelligent person recognizes there is a whole world of people out there who do talk without using these words. Just watch broadcast television for a couple of hours and you will not hear the f-bomb once, which ought to be a clue that it is possible to carry on complete conversations without using such language no matter how mindless the conversations are.

The second kind of Effer is more insidious and contemptible to my mind. These Effers know very well that there is another way to talk, but they don’t care. It is as though they are caught up in the “shock and awe” of their hard hitting, cutting edge, and colorful language. I think a lot of them are truly delighted knowing that they are making people wince, causing discomfort, or raising feelings of disgust in others. They are not so concerned with the message they are trying to convey as they are simply satisfying their own need to be the center of attention. There is a certain spoiled brat psychology at work. Go to a college campus and you will find these Effers everywhere, including some standing at the lectern. Certain movies in recent memory are so laden with Effer’s language it seems that was the whole point of the movie and the story be damned.

In the end, however, I think it is wrong to conclude that Effer’s fall into two kinds, those who don’t know any better and those who do. To my mind, and you can agree or not, they are both just stupid. The one thing that makes us unique, or at least the most advanced life form on Earth, is our ability to communicate detailed information, complex ideas and symbols to each other. Those who eschew meaningful dialog from most of their fellows by choosing to be an Effer are just obnoxious, lazy or ignorant, in a word, stupid.

The language used by the Effers, all those f-words, mf-words, c-words and the rest have lost their meaning. The words have been so over used that hardly anyone actually pictures the sex act when someone says fuck, for example. The only meaning that comes through is the intent to shock when spoken once and to create a sort of numbness when said too many times in succession, similar to a hand plunged into ice water and held there too long.

With that we come, finally, back to the irony.

The title of this rant is Cursing and Swearing. I spent a deal of time talking about the use of bad words in language, the act of people using profanity in their communication. The ironic part of all this is that the two words, forms of curse and swear, only have the meaning of pejorative language—pejorative literally means “to make worse words”—as a secondary, tertiary, or lower meaning.

In most dictionaries, the primary definition of curse is to wish ill on someone, to put a spell of magic on them, or to call God’s wrath to them. You have to get far down the list of meanings to find “execrate in fervent and often profane terms,” and that meaning has more of a religious context than one of simply using bad words.

To swear means even less the act of saying bad words than curse does. Swear primarily means to take or make an oath. We “swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” thousands of times a day in courthouses all over the country. We also “swear to take this woman” (I can’t stop it) in thousands more weddings every day. In fact, in most dictionaries, swear meaning to use profane language is seventh or eighth down the list in importance.

Except for Effers, it seems to me that when the rest of us curse or swear often our intent is to insult. Yet, the Effers have made those insults mostly meaningless through over use of the words. So let me urge you to become more imaginative or descriptive in your intended insults.

Don’t say, “Fuck you” to the fellow you really want to wound. Instead, say something like “May you conjoin with a pederastic pediculous pustule of pusillanimous parsimony.”

Now that’s cursing.