I grew up in a Southern Fundamentalist household, which mean that the strongest language heard in our house was an occasional "darn." Even "geez" was borderline, since in my mother's opinion it was just a cheater's way of saying "Jesus," and not in a prayerful sort of way. (I'm not going to count the things my dad would say to the lawnmower when it refused to start, since he did that out in the yard and my mother's position on that was, what? Daddy said what? I didn't hear anything.) So when I grew up and became a newspaper reporter, my virginal ears were quickly assaulted by what passed for daily conversation in the newsroom--which, in those pre-PC days, was extremely blue. "Goddamn shithead motherfucker..." "What an asshole...." "Why the fuck did he..." --all this and more was just normal discourse, a kind of constant background noise which nobody thought twice about. The result was that, after a late start in the cussin' department, I finally learned how, and from some real pros. Everybody knows that the South has a formidable literary reputation; what they may not know is that much of that literary gift has been put to work in the cause of coming up with some phrases that would peel the shellac off your dining room table. We are talking about colorful, inventive and highly original ways of taking Our Lord's Name in Vain.So it was a great place to pick up bad habits--and, as bad habits do, this one quickly became entrenched behavior. Occasionally, if I let something slip in the presence of my mother, she would fix me with a stern gaze and say, "Tracy Anne, you were not raised to talk that way." And I would reply, "Yes, Mama, I know. I had to go out and learn it on my OWN."
And then I had kids. Before the arrival of Kid #1, my husband put me on notice that I was going to have to clean up my language. How did this come up? Well, for a while, in the later stages of pregnancy, I got this thing where every time I bent over, the baby's head pressed on my diaphragm muscle and something would spasm and I would get the hiccups. Let me tell you, this is funny the first time it happens, mildly amusing the second and third times, and after that it makes you want to kill somebody. I kept saying (Hic) "GodDAMN it!" and my husband would say, "Would you please stop cursing?" and then I would go bang my head against a wall or something. But I tried. Truly, I did my best.
But I am only human, which is a roundabout way of saying that neither one of my kids is going to have to go beyond the confines of the family home to learn how to cuss a blue streak--because, whether I intended to or not (and I definitely did not) they are learning some new words from me. I swear (get it? SWEAR) I try to keep it clean, but inevitably something comes up, and usually the "something" involves serious and unexpected pain. Like what happened yesterday.
What happened was, Suzanne accidentally shut the minivan door on my right hand. That time, I managed (heroically, if I do say so) to keep my exclamations to just saying "OH! OH! OH!" over and over, while Suzanne was saying, "Mommy are you okay, mommy are you okay?" over and over. By the end of the day, my right hand was bruised from the tip of my fourth finger halfway down to my wrist, and on the palm side as well. (I'm looking at it right now, and it's pretty spectacular.) And then, this morning, Suzanne and I were getting ready to go run some errands when I realized there was a great big heavy table in the back of the minivan that I'd forgotten to ask my husband to unload for me. So I tried to drag it out with my left hand, with some limited assistance from my bruised right hand, and of course it fell. On my left foot.
And, my fellow Americans, as Richard Nixon would say (and he was no slouch in the Bad Language Department, as the Watergate Tapes make abundantly clear), it is a good thing we have the First Amendment in this country, because at that point I fully availed myself of its freedoms. And somewhere through the roaring in my head and the fierce throbbing of my foot, I could hear my eight-year-old daughter's voice saying, "Mommy, did you just say the S word?" Hell YES, I said the S word. That was the LEAST of what I said, as best I can recall.
I guess it's not all bad, though. At least this way there is absolutely nothing my kids will ever hear on the playground that will be new or titillating, that they will be tempted to go around repeating for the shock value--because, for them, there will BE no shock value. The F word? Ho-hum. I mean, I wanted them to have large vocabularies, though this was not exactly how I'd planned to teach them. Still, once Bad Words lose their thrill value, and I explain to them that words are just words and that what is important is what those words convey and do to other people, maybe they will be interested in moving on to some other words that are more interesting. And I will say to them that Bad Words are to language what Tabasco Sauce is to cooking--something you might, on occasion, use a drop or two of. But only, I will say, on very, very special occasions, like when a 50-pound table falls on their foot. And the bruise from that, by the way, makes that bruise on my hand look like a teeny widdle boo-boo.
Recent Comments