Forswearing the Commonplace : Euphemisms may not be the answer, but how about a little imagination in our vituperation?

I’m no good at swearing. My parents sorely neglected my education in profanity. My mother’s strongest oaths were “phooey” and, when extremely vexed, “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” About once a year, my father would accidentally bang his thumb with a hammer and repeatedly take God’s name in vain, but that was as bad as he got.

The worst cursing I heard in my childhood was from our dentist. He had been in the army for years, and the air turned blue while he worked on his patients’ teeth. I didn’t pick up any of his vocabulary, however, and thought that the invective was just part of the whole awful experience, like the shots and the drill and the pain.

I learned early that language could be dangerous. A boy was kicked out of my kindergarten class for uttering a naughty word. Try as I might, I could never find out what the word was. I thus spent my preschool years in terror that it would one day drop randomly from my lips. I feared becoming the girl in the fairy tale whose mouth spewed vipers and toads and who finally crawled to a corner of the forest to die.

In grade school, foul language was forbidden. By then, I knew at least some of the words I wasn’t supposed to say. Occasionally, boys caught swearing were hauled away by a male teacher to have their mouths washed out with soap. I didn’t believe that scrubbing an offending tongue would cleanse the mind, but I kept my thoughts to myself.

One afternoon, the seventh- and eighth-grade girls were assembled. Rumor had it that one of us had been overheard saying “damn” in the schoolyard. The principal lectured us for more than an hour, warning that we would never grow up to be ladies if we spoke such blasphemies. I asked if it was acceptable to say “darn” or “doggone” and was told that such words, although less offensive, were still unladylike. This answer troubled me. I didn’t wish to “talk dirty,” but I liked the idea of euphemistic remodeling. My mother had told me it was all right to say “H-E-double toothpicks” in place of “hell.” If utterance and not thought was the issue, then substitutes provided a clever escape from censure.

By the time I finished college, the ‘60s had started. In language, all you-know-what broke loose and has never frozen over. It was as if much of the country’s population had suddenly been struck with Tourette’s Syndrome, the rare affliction that forces its victims to cuss compulsively. And it was not just men who began punctuating every other sentence with expletives; women, too, began to swear like stevedores. Phrases once seen only on the walls of public bathrooms were heard everywhere. The world was made safe for linguistic democracy.

But it was too late for me. I couldn’t bring myself to say aloud the classic Anglo-Saxon obscenities. I couldn’t even mutter them under my breath or write them on the roof of my mouth with my tongue. To express intense feelings, I said things like “aw, shoot!” and “oh, fudge!” Why should a couple of vowels or consonants mark the boundary between propriety and impropriety? Sometimes, small things can make a big difference in how we create our social selves.

My inability to be a successful swearer may be a symptom of a larger cultural issue. All too frequently, profanity seems anti-female in its uses and intentions. I’m probably not the only woman who feels I’m borrowing a masculinist mode if I rail at someone. Profanity, as it is now practiced, cannot give me authority in my own voice as a woman. It’s hard to imagine what a feminist way of swearing would be, but perhaps someday our own expletives of empowerment will evolve.

I’m not against the concept of swearing. As Mark Twain said, “Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.” But I’m bored with the commonness of today’s curses. Almost everyone shouts the same no-longer-shocking insults, slings the same spray-paint slurs. When you see someone lean out of a car and start yelling at another driver, you can fill in the blankety-blanks yourself. Vituperation has a role to play in our daily frustrations, but a little bleeping creativity couldn’t hurt.