About My “Potty Mouth”
My potty mouth is probably due to a powerful combo of nature and nurture, so give me a you-know-what break.
According to family legend, my parents decided to stop cursing when I was around age four. My mother had hauled something out of the oven and I, in my squeaky-pitched little girl voice declared, “Jesus Christ, burned again.”
My mother probably laughed. My father, the man who could and would decline Latin nouns at the dinner table, probably cringed. I imagine they looked at one another, rolled their eyes, and decided to stop cursing.
Easier sworn than done.
It was my mother, in fact, who turned the air bright blue with expletives. My father was the one who sighed and suffered in silence before exclaiming, “The language in this family.”
Note, however, his discomfort did not extend to cursing in Yiddish. That swearing was okay, possibly because he was more comforted than offended by hearing the language of his childhood. All that cursing in Yiddish took place at my maternal grandparents’ house, primarily by my grandmother. The woman strafed everyone with epithets and peppered her speech — in English and Yiddish — with highly descriptive and exuberant profanity. If she were alive today, she’d be the undefeated champion of WTF.
All this took place during the 1950s and 1960s, so what’s currently considered mild swearing was judged as deeply offensive and oh-so-déclassé back then — words like “hell,” “damn,” “crap,” and “God dammit.” Trash talking (a.k.a., character assassination) was pretty much limited to “bitch,” “bastard,” “SOB,” and in case that abbreviation wasn’t clear, the full clarification: “son of a bitch.” Thus, normative utterances of “oh shit” by my grandmother and mother were pretty damn outré for the time. And I do not doubt for one New York minute that F-bombs were being detonated behind closed doors. Uh, no shit, right?
I left home for college and the rest of life. For a while, the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” (RIP, George Denis Patrick Carlin) were markedly absent from my speech. Then, they were back. I vividly remember the time (c. 1999), I elicited audible gasps when, during a meeting, I characterized something as “bullshit.”
“What?”
“I have never heard you swear.”
Looking back, I believe encountering that stunned reaction to a most appropriate use of the expletive “bullshit” was a moment of liberation. Liberation from what I no longer give a crap about figuring out.
In 2004, I joyously memorized lyrics to the Team America World Police theme song, “America F*#k Yeah!,” something that’s coming in mighty f*#king handy these days. In 2014, I felt vindicated by research about how swearing serves an emotional and possibly healing function.
According to my calculations, I’m now only a bit older than my grandmother was during my childhood and adolescence. Like so many around me, especially my online cohort, I use the F-word as a noun, verb, adjective adverb, and gerund — in public speech. My social media communications often include #WTF, #OMFG, #STFU, and my current go-to favorite: #FFS. And, believe it or not, these acronyms (with or without hashtags) are also frequently used by spiritual seekers and yes, even clergy, with whom I connect online to share observations about the agonies and ecstasies embodiment. Check it TF out if you don’t believe me.
I recently tried to blame my robust vocabulary of expletives (a.k.a., “potty mouth”) and frequent use of them on my habits of binge-watching “Sons of Anarchy,” “VEEP,” “Orange is the New Black” and the like on Netflix, social media, and hanging out (read: working) with people nearly half my chronological age. WTF was I thinking? Clearly my potty mouth is evidence of matrilineal succession.
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