Pardon My French

With gentle encouragement from Sara I agreed to quit cussing. Anyone who knows me, or has had the misfortune of being in line with me at an airline service counter after my flight has been canceled, understands the enormity of this challenge.

I’ve had a potty mouth for years, going all the way back to the first grade when Miss Shaklett washed out my mouth with Bab-o, the cheaper equivalent of Comet, for saying ‘damn hell’ on the playground of Norman Binkley Elementary School in Nashville, Tennessee.

After almost 40 years the memory of the incident still makes me queasy. You’d think I would have learned my lesson back in 1970, but all I really got from the abuse was that ‘damn hell’ is a poor combination and Miss Shaklett was a royal bitch.

My proficiency with the coarser side of the English language has improved a shit ton since then, especially my verbal adroitness with the word fuck. I frequently drop the ‘F’ word, often multiple times in the same phrase, as in “…fuck that fucking little fuckwit.” Concurrently, primarily due to my fascination with Dead English Writers, I’ve amassed a fairly respectable arsenal of what I like to call ‘$2 words.’ Often these two sets of vocabulary merge and produce a single oxymoronic sentence like: ‘That Troy Aikman is a loquacious mother fucker and I wish he’d shut the fuck up.’

Sara claims that my excessive use of obscenities leads people to believe that I’m either stupid, inarticulate, angry, or all of the above. She’s probably right since she almost always is, but I’ve long held the belief that a single epithet provides more punch than pounds of so called ‘clean’ language. I’ve now come to realize that isn’t always true. Overuse weakens just about everything -- consider the brakes on a ’91 Saab. Trust me, they wear out, many times over. So it is with words. Through intemperate use I’ve robbed profanity of its power. What should have a sharp, glinting edge is now blunt and lackluster. Well shit.

To be completely honest, it’s not possible for me to eliminate expletives from my speech altogether, but I can control them. My hope is that through judicious use, scurrility will become the habanera rather than the salt and pepper of my speech.

Fuck. (I had to swear gratuitously, just one more damn time.)