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I've had some inspiration to think about the word "fuck" and some of it's brethren in the last few years. My son will soon be seventeen and I know with some certainty that he uses the word, probably quite often, whether he's playing ice hockey (what wonderful opportunities that presents) or just hanging out with his friends. But he hasn't ever said it in front of me. And he knows that I say it, and has in fact heard me say it in this and that ripe situation when it was the first word that came to my mind, but I don't use it (when I'm thinking) in our regular conversation. So why, I ask myself, is that? I think it's because I don't want him to get so comfortable that he would say it in front of me, and then, when the time was right, direct it at me. Maybe this is the American way of indirectly teaching the nuances of language usage to our young. My son and his sister hear my wife and I "slip" sometimes (and we all laugh) but we tend not to pepper our conversation with "that fucking..." this or that.
On the other hand, my oldest sister (we're both in our fifties) made it very clear to me last year that she didn't want to see any "filthy" words on her computer screen. (I'd forwarded a post by Steve Clemons about the film Team America titles "America - Fuck Yeah!"). To me my sister represents the system I grew up in, where no one was allowed to even refer to those words. My father, when he'd hit his thumb with a hammer, would at the worst say "son of a buck." My reading of that system was that it came from my maternal grandmother's puritanical roots (her family came from Maine or somewhere like that). My mother was the strict enforcer, and my sister, when pressed, will say "Our mother didn't want those words in her house, and I don't either" and on and on. I eventually had to tell my sister to go fuck herself. The end.Posted at June 20, 2005 9:04 AM in response to Bad words and poetry
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I haven't reached that point yet where I can actually enjoy the humor that our president presents when he chooses to marticulate in promptu. More power to you who can, for there surely is much to laugh at, though even that thought troubles me when the object of derision is supposed to be a leader of the free world. World B. Free would have made a better leader, perhaps.
Posted at June 1, 2005 6:07 PM in response to The more I watch Bush on TV these days, the lighter my heart becomes.
