The other day, while cleaning up after my daughter, Clementine, I found something very disturbing: I found a list she had been compiling of all of the swear words that she and her friends knew. While there were many things that were disturbing about the list, one of the worst was the sheer number of words that were left off of it–including some of my personal favorites.
Now, I know that times change, and that nothing changes as fast as slang, but I find it hard to believe that a word that Lenny Bruce once described as “a ten letter word describing any woman I would like to meet or possibly some day marry” could ever fall so far out of favor that it would fail to pass muster with today’s hip swearers (what I like to think of as the “curserati”).
And then there was the word that has been such a staple of the curseworld for so long that if it were ever to disappear entirely an entire swath of the English-speaking world would be left speechless. (I am referring, of course, to the word used to such good effect by Monty Python in their sketch about the man who confused his c’s with his b’s; I think the name of it was “Silly Bunts”).
But, disturbing as it was to see which cursing classic didn’t make the list, it was even more disturbing to see the ones that did. Words like “crap.”
Crap.
Ever since my children were small I have allowed them to watch shows like “South Park” and listen to music from the likes of Mickey Avalon, and this is how they repay me? With “crap?” Crap is so far from being a swear word that I can even write it in the pages of Flag Live without having to make either Lenny Bruce or Monty Python allusions. I mean, just watch: crap, crap, crap. You see? I just wrote it three times, and Ryan (Flag Live’s beloved editor), hasn’t once reached for that bottle of Scotch he keeps hidden in his “special editor drawer.” (Actually, I’m making up the part about Ryan, and the Scotch. We all know that, like all editors, he drinks nothing but Appletinis and Fuzzy Navels.)
But enough about girly drinking habits. My point is that, if now, at the prime swearing age of twelve, Clementine thinks that “crap” is an actual swear word, what happens when she hits middle school? “Bull Puckey?” “Cheese and Rice?” I shudder to think about the consequences: if she doesn’t learn to swear–and more importantly, if the newness of it doesn’t wear off soon–she’ll end up like one of those guys. You know, the ones who always sit behind you at the movies; the ones who only learned how to swear in the last two weeks? (Or so it would seem.)
Why else would they think that every single word they speak (or rather, shout), needs to be preceded by the gerund of a certain word describing fornication? In fact, their use of this word is so prevalent that it is almost as if they are trying to speak pig Latin, and just got a little confused. (“No, no, no: it’s end every word with ‘ay,’ not start every word with ‘ef’.”)
Anyway, that’s the position Clementine could find herself in if she doesn’t step up her swearing game soon. If only there were some kind of “swearing boot camp” I could send her to–other than, of course, the entire island of Great Britain. Because sending her to Britain would not only be prohibitively expensive, but she also might come back not only swearing, but drinking and smoking as well.
Although I guess that wouldn’t be so bad–as long as she didn’t come back drinking Appletinis.