Ron’s Blog

Cussin’ and hatin’

Another recent Oz-let:

Oz has a pretty remarkably undeveloped sense about swearing. Once or twice the idea of a “bad word” has come up, but hardly at all. I’m a little surprised by this; by second grade, I hadn’t started swearing (that began in earnest in fifth grade), but I certainly had heard the big words a bit. And frankly, the wife and I were both a touch on the foul-mouthed side even when we first knew each other, and have really only toned it way down since becoming parents.

So the other evening, Oz asked me if “bitches” was a bad word (although he said the version he’d seen written in graffiti somewhere was spelled “bitchez”). I said it was; that it was a word of hatred and meanness directed typically toward women and girls, and that we chose not to use hateful words like that; and that it was swearing.

So he asked, “what’s swearing?” I was a little taken aback; I didn’t know he didn’t know the word. So I told him that swearing was using words that had come to be considered very impolite, and that often (but not always), that was because they were words of meanness, like “bitches”. I was ready to launch into my bit on how “shit” and “ass” are words that aren’t mean or hateful, but just socially labeled as vulgar; whereas “bitch” and “faggot” were words that were mean and hateful. But he didn’t need the follow-up, this time. He was OK with where we left it, and you gotta keep your eye (especially if you’re like me) on whether you’re headed into the too-much-info realm.

I’m very inclined toward keeping things like this from gaining the power that labeling them as ‘taboo’ gives them. So, I don’t hesitate to use the word (OK, maybe I’m mentioning rather than using) in the discussion, and would go with introducing “shit” and the like without hesitation.

Which reminds me of a little episode from grad school: I worked a couple of summers at the “Dorchester House”, a community center in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, mostly riding herd on 10-year-olds. At one point, having caught a racial slur whispered among them, and in service of the hateful-vs.-merely-vulgar distinction, I told the bunch of them that I’d much rather hear someone call somebody else “motherfucker” than “nigger” or “honky” (hey, it was the early 80’s, OK?). As you might imagine, they sat up and took notice. Then, they called each other “motherfucker” for the rest of the summer.

Just kidding about the last part.