Britney Swears and So Do I
Childish. Unquestionably not terribly original. Sort of funny though, in that Beavis and Butthead junior high school kind of way.
Where did you learn how to swear? Did you have that Christmas Story moment? You know, the scene where Ralphie is helping his dad change the tire and the lug nuts get knocked all over the roadway and Ralphie lets loose with an “Oh Fudge”, except (naturally) the narrator notes “I didn’t say fudge!”
I don’t recall any particular moment like that with my parents. I do recall one bright early summer afternoon toward the end of 6th grade when a kid came on the bus after school and announced to the teeming masses “Hey, you wanna know what fuck means?” Think anyone said “no”? Of course not. So our linguistics major continued with “It means…” and he proceeded to describe in some detail the act of insertion involved using the finest slang terms for genitalia available to humankind in the late 1970s. I will omit those here to avoid being tagged adult content, NSFW, or worse Parental Advisory.
My dad was a military man for much of his life which means he was quite comfortable swearing in front of me though swearing in front of my mother was generally frowned upon. Neither parent was of the overly protective sort in the “my child’s virgin ears!” sense. When I was still pretty young they let me listen to some of the great comedy records of the 1970’s that were filled with profanity. My folks were great parents in having the common sense to realize that hearing some curses wouldn’t turn their kid into a child-molesting serial killer or other moral degenerate. Either that, or they figured I’d already heard worse at school or on one of the days I spent at work with my dad at the armory, happily climbing around on the tanks, APC’s, jeeps and trucks in the motor pool and occasionally being pressed into service to paint camo patterns on the vehicles.
Back in those pre e-mail days people would circulate jokes via photocopy sent in interoffice mail or even snail mail. So when I would go to work with dad there would often be lots of 50th generation photocopied lists of filthy jokes lying around on file cabinets and what have you. I learned a lot of my profane slang from those jokes even if I didn’t know what they were talking about at the time. You also didn’t have to worry about harassment issues or what have you; it was a National Guard maintenance shop for God’s sake, there wasn’t a woman within a few miles unless it was some kind of open house day or someone’s wife dropped off a lunch for hubby or something.
I suspect that today practically every youngster learns how to swear and gets his dictionary of vulgar terminology from one place: the web. And that’s a bit of a shame to me anyway since I’m not a fan of homogeneity. Then again, thanks to Slate maybe some precocious 11 year old just learned to swear like the literary giants do, nicely encoded so nervous mommy and daddy don’t pick up on it. That would be cool.
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