2015: My Year of Profanity

This year I became bilingual, but it wasn’t on purpose. I’m not talking Spanish, German, or Swahili, nothing nearly so fancy. No Rosetta Stone. No books. No audio recordings.

It has been the events of 2015 that have earned me a full scholarship to the School of Hard Knocks where I’ve been taught the power of violent words. First as a victim. Then as a user, resulting in my addiction to ejaculating immodest expressions of my true feelings rather than the euphemistic language to which I had grown accustomed. Yep, this year I learned the art of engineering combinations of violent words that would push all the right buttons at just the right times. I’m fluent in profanity.

It became apparent to me that the delicately crafted utterances I once used only benefited others and their feelings. You see, I had been taught to be polite with “please” and “thank you.” I even practiced “sir” and “m’am” although I wasn’t reared in the South and never offered my service to the military. I always turned the proverbial “other cheek” when met with rude people with coarse, crude language because I thought it was right and proper. As a result, countless times I was left bleeding internally from my emotions, unaffirmed, and angry with myself for not saying what the fuck I wanted to say in the first got damn place. (See how that came out so easily?)

My teachers during my transformation were a tsunami of pent up hurt, multiple monuments of anger, and deeply permeating feelings of helplessness. Through my numerous encounters with selfish individuals who cared about their own feelings and their own personal agendas, I came to conclude that there is a new culture of people who say, “I don’t give a fuck,” and they actually mean it. Folks everywhere have become selfish with their words and who can really blame them when it now seems to be the way of the world?

It’s those me-my-I individuals who have spurned me to learn the art of sniping with verbal artillery-like rapid word fire, that sends folks ducking, dodging, and damaged by my carefully aimed and sharply pointed words. Yes, profanity has become my second language. Only . . . I HATE IT. It’s a crass, low-brow, below-the-belt attack that chips away at humanity, potentially leaving both victim and assailant feeling dirty and the latter looking every bit like a bully.

Raised in a nurturing Christian home, I had parents who rarely cursed under their breath let alone out loud and they most certainly never “cussed” anyone out. Although we see it increasingly in movies and on television, I never called my mother a bitch (and never wanted to) and neither of our parents ever called us anything that could be considered even remotely abusive. They only “blessed us out” with lectures soaked in scripture and parables lifted from one of the good books before lovingly whooping our behinds. The ugliness of profanity and obscene name calling, simply weren’t symbols of love or tools of child discipline from my parents’ point of view.

Growing up, my siblings and I never got comfortable carelessly throwing around “cuss words” like the belligerent forays heard in the classrooms and hallways of my workplace, an urban public high school. We didn’t need to do that when I was a child. If my brother made me mad enough, I could simply call him “ashy” and that was enough to leave him wounded and me satisfied with all the victory a little kid might need or want in that moment. You could not have convinced me that a curse word would have done more damage. My siblings and I were carefully sewn into psalms and proverbs, resting in their safety, believing there were real world benefits for “watching our mouths.”