I Swear
‘I Swear….
The other day I told my eight year old that Saddam meant “shut up” in Arabic and that he was going to grow up to be just like Saddam Hussein if he didn’t stop telling his brother to shut up.
OK. So I’m not Dr. Spock. The reason I started worrying about it in the first place was because of this little mother I met who told me that she never allowed her children to say shut up to each other ever. Gosh, I remember a hundred years ago when I had my first kids and I never used to let them say, “Shut up!” and we never bought Captain Crunch or watched TV before homework or ate junk food for snacks or said, “Gosh, Bishop, I’m just too busy to do that!” Those were the good old days.
Or course, those kids are also in graduate school now and good responsible grown men and women. What’s going to happen to these little guys now that their mom has grown old and corrupt? So I decided we should maybe start first with language.
What are the swear word in your house? I’ve noticed that everybody has different “no-no” words. For example, we never say the name of that place where you go where it’s really hot and not amount of sunscreen is ever going to save you. And we never say that thing that beavers use to make ponds in streams. On the other hand, we always say that word that describes the area of your body that connects your back to the top or your legs. For example, “Get up off your --- and get your room cleaned!” WE also say lot so synonym for it—like the one that also describes someone who loiters around street corners and never works or the one that people use to describe the back of businesses or the back of their car like, “The trash cans are located at the r___ of the building” or “I was r___-ended in a traffic accident at a red light yesterday.”
We also say that word that describes barnyard refuse. Not that nasty, harsh one that tarts with what you say to your kids when you want them to shut up in church but the one that rhymes with what you do with Christmas packages when you cover them all up with paper before you give them to people and starts with a “c”. We use that all the time although we agree that it’s not a very lady-and-gentle men like.
We never use the word that starts with “f” and rhymes with you know what. However, I have been surprised to find while sitting in front of pretty little blond children in twin sets and pearls at the movies, that lots of kids do. Gosh, when we were teenagers, we thought were bordering on jail bait with the barnyard “s” word.
I’ve noticed that lots of other families think differently. Some people say my no-no words al the time and don’t think of it as swearing. Our grandma and grandpa use some of them occasionally—I guess when you’ve spent a lifetime behind a horse and plow, you need something a little stronger to express your feelings about things sometimes. Some families are also much stricter about everything their kids say including things like “jerk”, “wimp”, and descriptive phrasing like “you make me sick, you weirdo”. I figure a certain amount of that goes on and has to be said and that you might as well say it at home as out in public where people are going to think you’re parents are awful.
I have this theory that every body has positive and negative inside and that it has to come out somewhere. If you spread yourself too thin with good works, the negative starts to come through—like when you spend all day helping out at school being too swear or being too nice at work and you feel like killing somebody when you get home. Or if you pretend that nothing inside you is negative, that you completely love everybody all the time, then pretty soon you’re going to crack up and be on those people who goes berserk in a parking lot and everybody says, “I don’t know what got into them, they were such a nice person.” I also don’t trust people who are wonderful all the time because they give me the creeps.
However, whenever I say something that I wish I wouldn’t have, I always think of that guote about swearing being the attempt of a feeble mind to express itself strongly. Sometimes I have to admit that my mind is just fee le and that’s all there is to it. Someone needs to come up with a good list of non-feeble-minded swear words that you can use to describe your need for silence, IMMEDIATELY; your utter contempt for the driver in front of you who has all day when you have exactly one more minute to get to where yo’re going or you’re in big trouble; and your need to describe people and situations who are beyond belief—and beyond your verbal powers.
I would really appreciate it if someone would write this list up for me before say, noon tomorrow, or my next extremely stressful moment—whichever comes first—so as to say myself form the negative effect of potential feeble-mindedness.
If you don’t I swear… I’m going to go nuts.
The other day I told my eight year old that Saddam meant “shut up” in Arabic and that he was going to grow up to be just like Saddam Hussein if he didn’t stop telling his brother to shut up.
OK. So I’m not Dr. Spock. The reason I started worrying about it in the first place was because of this little mother I met who told me that she never allowed her children to say shut up to each other ever. Gosh, I remember a hundred years ago when I had my first kids and I never used to let them say, “Shut up!” and we never bought Captain Crunch or watched TV before homework or ate junk food for snacks or said, “Gosh, Bishop, I’m just too busy to do that!” Those were the good old days.
Or course, those kids are also in graduate school now and good responsible grown men and women. What’s going to happen to these little guys now that their mom has grown old and corrupt? So I decided we should maybe start first with language.
What are the swear word in your house? I’ve noticed that everybody has different “no-no” words. For example, we never say the name of that place where you go where it’s really hot and not amount of sunscreen is ever going to save you. And we never say that thing that beavers use to make ponds in streams. On the other hand, we always say that word that describes the area of your body that connects your back to the top or your legs. For example, “Get up off your --- and get your room cleaned!” WE also say lot so synonym for it—like the one that also describes someone who loiters around street corners and never works or the one that people use to describe the back of businesses or the back of their car like, “The trash cans are located at the r___ of the building” or “I was r___-ended in a traffic accident at a red light yesterday.”
We also say that word that describes barnyard refuse. Not that nasty, harsh one that tarts with what you say to your kids when you want them to shut up in church but the one that rhymes with what you do with Christmas packages when you cover them all up with paper before you give them to people and starts with a “c”. We use that all the time although we agree that it’s not a very lady-and-gentle men like.
We never use the word that starts with “f” and rhymes with you know what. However, I have been surprised to find while sitting in front of pretty little blond children in twin sets and pearls at the movies, that lots of kids do. Gosh, when we were teenagers, we thought were bordering on jail bait with the barnyard “s” word.
I’ve noticed that lots of other families think differently. Some people say my no-no words al the time and don’t think of it as swearing. Our grandma and grandpa use some of them occasionally—I guess when you’ve spent a lifetime behind a horse and plow, you need something a little stronger to express your feelings about things sometimes. Some families are also much stricter about everything their kids say including things like “jerk”, “wimp”, and descriptive phrasing like “you make me sick, you weirdo”. I figure a certain amount of that goes on and has to be said and that you might as well say it at home as out in public where people are going to think you’re parents are awful.
I have this theory that every body has positive and negative inside and that it has to come out somewhere. If you spread yourself too thin with good works, the negative starts to come through—like when you spend all day helping out at school being too swear or being too nice at work and you feel like killing somebody when you get home. Or if you pretend that nothing inside you is negative, that you completely love everybody all the time, then pretty soon you’re going to crack up and be on those people who goes berserk in a parking lot and everybody says, “I don’t know what got into them, they were such a nice person.” I also don’t trust people who are wonderful all the time because they give me the creeps.
However, whenever I say something that I wish I wouldn’t have, I always think of that guote about swearing being the attempt of a feeble mind to express itself strongly. Sometimes I have to admit that my mind is just fee le and that’s all there is to it. Someone needs to come up with a good list of non-feeble-minded swear words that you can use to describe your need for silence, IMMEDIATELY; your utter contempt for the driver in front of you who has all day when you have exactly one more minute to get to where yo’re going or you’re in big trouble; and your need to describe people and situations who are beyond belief—and beyond your verbal powers.
I would really appreciate it if someone would write this list up for me before say, noon tomorrow, or my next extremely stressful moment—whichever comes first—so as to say myself form the negative effect of potential feeble-mindedness.
If you don’t I swear… I’m going to go nuts.
Comments