Reversing the Cursing
Mar. 9th, 2005 04:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfieldThis guy in my office just said "fuck."
It was fairly casual, too. It's not like he slammed his finger in a desk drawer or accidentally set himself on fire. It wasn't even a cataclysmic work problem, like miscalculating the coffee budget or anything. He just happened to get a package in the mail with more health insurance paperwork.
"More fucking booklets," R. said.
It doesn't bother me, really. I could see how it might bother L., who was on the phone with a client, very probably a wealthy and powerful client, possibly even an important lawmaker, right across the hall. Of course, L. is also known for bending people's ears about her son and how he used to eat his boogers. So clearly our office is not going to win any congeniality awards.
It does seem kind of unusual, though, to hear that word in the office. Sure, people say "damn it" around here all the time, although that's barely a swear word anymore.[1]
After all, my office is socially conservative, which is what happens when everyone but me happens to have been born before the Beatles broke up. So it's natural that foul language would seem out-of-place. But adding to my discomfort is the fact that I'm still getting used to swearing myself.
At first, my refusal to use swear words was a form of rebellion against my mother, who is a sweet, demure, well-educated and well-spoken woman until you piss her off, at which point she becomes a thermonuclear swear bomb, emitting high-level expletive fallout within her vocal radius. She is particularly unstable when in heavy traffic or when angry with my dad, to whom she will occasionally refer as "you son-of-a-bitch-bastard-prick." It was sort of a proud moment, the first time she referred to me as "you son-of-a-bitch-bastard-prick," or at least it would have been if she hadn't been chasing me around with a long wooden spoon.
My brother and I would bust my mother's chops about it, and not following her example was my way of exerting my youthful independence. (Or possibly my extreme dorkiness.[2])
Then, in later adolescence, I rationalized my commitment to polite language as the embodiment of some sort of chivalrous ideal. This only accentuates the nerdiness of me; at a time when most twelve-year-old boys were fascinated with mysticism and wizards and knights slaying dragons, I was fascinated by courtly etiquette.
Once I grew into early manhood and began to fancy myself some kind of communicator, I disdained curse words as a cheap and uncreative use of language. Why say, "Rush Limbaugh is an asshole," when you could say "Rush Limbaugh eats babies." Besides, not swearing was a way for me to distinguish myself from my peers, whose interpersonal communication was derived mostly from excerpts of 2 Live Crew and Denis Leary tapes.
I didn't use swear words regularly until my junior year of college. It wasn't because the guys in my fraternity had started referring to me as "Flanders," which I took as a pejorative but nevertheless earnest recognition of my dedication to clean language.
I don't remember if there was a particular incident or impetus for my abandonment of the Flanders Way, though I suspect it had something to do with a lady, whether it was because college-age girls weren't interested in dudes who talked like their grandfather or because some girl ripped my heart out and I needed to shout something.
It was probably "Fuck." Of all the curse words, I think Fuck is the most fun to say. There's something linguistically pleasant about the sound of the word. It's powerful without being unwieldy, visceral without being guttural. It begins with an urgent F sound, a common labiodental fricative, allowing the speaker a gradual build-up to the word's explosive climax, much like the hissing of a bomb fuse. Then the word rounds into its vowel sound, the graceless but utile U, lifting the word into flight with its subtle yet primal "uhh" sound, thrusting the word forth into its percussive coda, the velar stop of the CK, slicing through the air like a woodsman's axe before landing squarely and solidly, perhaps drawing blood.
It's never been adequately explained to me why Fuck is considered to be the worst of the swear words. Fuck's power and versatility has been well established. In many contexts, Fuck can be a nice, dare I say romantic, little word. I can think of many pleasant sentences with the word Fuck playing a key role. So what makes it so bad?
Ever since I was a little kid, I always thought that Asshole ought to be considered the worst of the swear words. First of all, it's bigger – a full extra syllable of vitriol. And denotatively, it refers to a part of the anatomy that is considered to be the most unclean and shameful of all, considered "romantic and fun" in only the most deviant contexts.[3] But more than that, it is a word that is used almost exclusively in a derogatory manner, most commonly in a name-calling capacity. It is virtually impossible to use Asshole in a friendly way.
In the last decade or so, there has been a groundswell of support for an altogether different word as Worst Swear Word. In fact, it has attained such verboten status that I refuse to say it or even write it out. I will refer to it as the C-bomb, and I will only say that it rhymes with a certain kind of sacrifice play in baseball.[4]
We must also why the C-bomb has become so reviled. It follows a similar linguistic pattern as Fuck, except that it begins with a confrontational C, a velar stop, which is perhaps unsettlingly strident or jarring to the listener. It is, to use another rhyme, a blunt word, the rhetorical equivalent of a cudgel.
Perhaps it is because the word's purely linguistic qualities clashes so strongly with the word's denotative meaning – that is, the subject of Eve Ensler's squirm-inducing play – that it makes people uneasy. Society in general still thinks of a woman's C-bomb as a Secret Garden; the font of new life; mysterious, sacrosanct and beyond reproach. To address it – or worse, to address a woman as if to say she is nothing but it – with such a vulgar-sounding word is to cross a deeply embedded line of propriety. Accordingly, this phenomenon also applies to the similar word that rhymes with Squat, and, to a lesser extent, Pushy.
I've never heard R. use the C-bomb in the office. I have heard him say Fuck and Shit, usually in reference to paperwork. He is also the office's resident dirty-joke-teller, and on occasion he has even sent around bawdy e-mails, some of them featuring women with their C-bombs showing. This latter practice generally makes me feel rather uncomfortable, and probably would technically qualify as sexual harassment, which, like stalking and internet dating, always sounds a lot better in theory than it actually is in real life.
These days, I think I'm pretty normal with regard to foul language. While I have my moments of unabashed and inappropriate blue-streaking profanity – always when there are little children around, damn it – I still think an awful lot about it, which generally keeps me on my toes. I'm sure there are some people who still think I'm a bit of a Flanders. You might even say I'm sort of a square. Fuckin' asshole.
It was fairly casual, too. It's not like he slammed his finger in a desk drawer or accidentally set himself on fire. It wasn't even a cataclysmic work problem, like miscalculating the coffee budget or anything. He just happened to get a package in the mail with more health insurance paperwork.
"More fucking booklets," R. said.
It doesn't bother me, really. I could see how it might bother L., who was on the phone with a client, very probably a wealthy and powerful client, possibly even an important lawmaker, right across the hall. Of course, L. is also known for bending people's ears about her son and how he used to eat his boogers. So clearly our office is not going to win any congeniality awards.
It does seem kind of unusual, though, to hear that word in the office. Sure, people say "damn it" around here all the time, although that's barely a swear word anymore.[1]
After all, my office is socially conservative, which is what happens when everyone but me happens to have been born before the Beatles broke up. So it's natural that foul language would seem out-of-place. But adding to my discomfort is the fact that I'm still getting used to swearing myself.
At first, my refusal to use swear words was a form of rebellion against my mother, who is a sweet, demure, well-educated and well-spoken woman until you piss her off, at which point she becomes a thermonuclear swear bomb, emitting high-level expletive fallout within her vocal radius. She is particularly unstable when in heavy traffic or when angry with my dad, to whom she will occasionally refer as "you son-of-a-bitch-bastard-prick." It was sort of a proud moment, the first time she referred to me as "you son-of-a-bitch-bastard-prick," or at least it would have been if she hadn't been chasing me around with a long wooden spoon.
My brother and I would bust my mother's chops about it, and not following her example was my way of exerting my youthful independence. (Or possibly my extreme dorkiness.[2])
Then, in later adolescence, I rationalized my commitment to polite language as the embodiment of some sort of chivalrous ideal. This only accentuates the nerdiness of me; at a time when most twelve-year-old boys were fascinated with mysticism and wizards and knights slaying dragons, I was fascinated by courtly etiquette.
Once I grew into early manhood and began to fancy myself some kind of communicator, I disdained curse words as a cheap and uncreative use of language. Why say, "Rush Limbaugh is an asshole," when you could say "Rush Limbaugh eats babies." Besides, not swearing was a way for me to distinguish myself from my peers, whose interpersonal communication was derived mostly from excerpts of 2 Live Crew and Denis Leary tapes.
I didn't use swear words regularly until my junior year of college. It wasn't because the guys in my fraternity had started referring to me as "Flanders," which I took as a pejorative but nevertheless earnest recognition of my dedication to clean language.
I don't remember if there was a particular incident or impetus for my abandonment of the Flanders Way, though I suspect it had something to do with a lady, whether it was because college-age girls weren't interested in dudes who talked like their grandfather or because some girl ripped my heart out and I needed to shout something.
It was probably "Fuck." Of all the curse words, I think Fuck is the most fun to say. There's something linguistically pleasant about the sound of the word. It's powerful without being unwieldy, visceral without being guttural. It begins with an urgent F sound, a common labiodental fricative, allowing the speaker a gradual build-up to the word's explosive climax, much like the hissing of a bomb fuse. Then the word rounds into its vowel sound, the graceless but utile U, lifting the word into flight with its subtle yet primal "uhh" sound, thrusting the word forth into its percussive coda, the velar stop of the CK, slicing through the air like a woodsman's axe before landing squarely and solidly, perhaps drawing blood.
It's never been adequately explained to me why Fuck is considered to be the worst of the swear words. Fuck's power and versatility has been well established. In many contexts, Fuck can be a nice, dare I say romantic, little word. I can think of many pleasant sentences with the word Fuck playing a key role. So what makes it so bad?
Ever since I was a little kid, I always thought that Asshole ought to be considered the worst of the swear words. First of all, it's bigger – a full extra syllable of vitriol. And denotatively, it refers to a part of the anatomy that is considered to be the most unclean and shameful of all, considered "romantic and fun" in only the most deviant contexts.[3] But more than that, it is a word that is used almost exclusively in a derogatory manner, most commonly in a name-calling capacity. It is virtually impossible to use Asshole in a friendly way.
In the last decade or so, there has been a groundswell of support for an altogether different word as Worst Swear Word. In fact, it has attained such verboten status that I refuse to say it or even write it out. I will refer to it as the C-bomb, and I will only say that it rhymes with a certain kind of sacrifice play in baseball.[4]
We must also why the C-bomb has become so reviled. It follows a similar linguistic pattern as Fuck, except that it begins with a confrontational C, a velar stop, which is perhaps unsettlingly strident or jarring to the listener. It is, to use another rhyme, a blunt word, the rhetorical equivalent of a cudgel.
Perhaps it is because the word's purely linguistic qualities clashes so strongly with the word's denotative meaning – that is, the subject of Eve Ensler's squirm-inducing play – that it makes people uneasy. Society in general still thinks of a woman's C-bomb as a Secret Garden; the font of new life; mysterious, sacrosanct and beyond reproach. To address it – or worse, to address a woman as if to say she is nothing but it – with such a vulgar-sounding word is to cross a deeply embedded line of propriety. Accordingly, this phenomenon also applies to the similar word that rhymes with Squat, and, to a lesser extent, Pushy.
I've never heard R. use the C-bomb in the office. I have heard him say Fuck and Shit, usually in reference to paperwork. He is also the office's resident dirty-joke-teller, and on occasion he has even sent around bawdy e-mails, some of them featuring women with their C-bombs showing. This latter practice generally makes me feel rather uncomfortable, and probably would technically qualify as sexual harassment, which, like stalking and internet dating, always sounds a lot better in theory than it actually is in real life.
These days, I think I'm pretty normal with regard to foul language. While I have my moments of unabashed and inappropriate blue-streaking profanity – always when there are little children around, damn it – I still think an awful lot about it, which generally keeps me on my toes. I'm sure there are some people who still think I'm a bit of a Flanders. You might even say I'm sort of a square. Fuckin' asshole.
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[4]
Date: 2005-03-09 09:22 pm (UTC)