I only heard my mother swear once.
The application had to be postmarked by the end of the day. I didn’t yet have my license, so my mother was going to drive me across the whole town to make it to the post office on time. I don’t remember what happened before, but I do remember the panic, the near hysteria (I was 17, after all,) and the formula-one-style driving. We tumbled out of the car and into the post office. “Just GIVE ME the envelope!” my mom yelled. I don’t remember what I did or said, just that her next statement was, “D*****.”
Silence.
I’d never heard her swear before, nor had I ever heard my father. The envelope went into the mail, we went back to the car, and rode in silence for a few blocks. The minivan lifted buoyantly over the road bumps. At a red light, my mother the native Spanish speaker cut the air by saying, “I never understood the difference between dam that stops the water and the other kind.”
“The other one has an ‘n’ at the end,” I said.
“Oh.”
And that was that.
Several years later, in a streak of delayed teenage rebellion that had everything to do with waiting tables at a diner, I picked up a mean swearing habit that still occasionally overwhelms me with a surge of emotion.
And when I met my husband he found it endearing.
I hardly noticed until I had my own children. Suddenly, I heard the swearing everywhere. I made a concerted effort to reduce or eliminate “language” from my dialogue. My children have never heard me swear, but my friends have.
We live in a microcosm of non-swearing culture. Everywhere around us, grocery stores, gas stations, on TV, in movies, even schools you hear “language” bubble up around us. I have had friends and colleagues that cannot seem to form a phrase without the f word, or really, many, many versions of the f word. To tell you the truth, the f word doesn’t bother me as much as hearing the Lord’s name taken in vain (that one feels like a little knife in my soul, making me twist with the pain.)
Are we the last of the non-swearing peoples?
Do you? Could you? Have you stopped? Indulged? Never ever?
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