“Some people love to swear. For others it makes them cringe. Where do you stand, and why?”
Oh, goodness. I don’t know at what point I started swearing; high school, maybe? But once I started swearing, I never really stopped.
I am sort of curious how that happened: all my life I’ve picked up on other people’s slang and absorbed it into my own. When I was close to a couple of Texans in college, “y’all” weaseled into my vocabulary, and that one stuck. I happen to like it as a concise second-person plural, which doesn’t have a distinct word in formal English. When I was friends with an English guy with an odd vocabulary, and we worked together, a lot of it slipped into my regular speech. And life with C: well, his group of friends has their own complex slang evolved over 25 years or so, and after more than a decade, it’s just part of how I talk now.
So who was it that I hung out with in my mid-teens who swore so much? My first thought is to blame my high school and college boyfriend, the guy who introduced me to a lot of interesting and shady experiences, whose weirdness shaped my persona in my late teens and early 20s. But I don’t remember him being much for swearing, so who knows.
Because I certainly didn’t pick it up at home. I don’t think I’ve ever heard my mother utter a curse word, and both of my sisters are much the same way. Me, on the other hand? I’ve been described as “swearing like a sailor.”
It amused me when Dylan said in the comments on the CSS Squirrel post that he’d never heard me swear. I guess he knows me better from my writing — in which I rarely swear, and when I do it’s a big deal — than in person. When I’m relaxed and in friendly company — or conversely when I’m upset — I swear a LOT. Like Dennis Leary quality a LOT.
Hm. We started watching Comedy Central when I was a teenager, and Edith and I loved his early stand-up. That would be weird (ironic?) if I picked up swearing from TV.
And it’s just casual and natural for me; I have to consciously think about it to NOT swear. The words just slip in between other words. When I exclaim, when I stub my toe or forget a semi-colon in my code, I exclaim with honest-to-god swear words, most of the time, rather than the fraks and darns that a more careful person might use.
I don’t know how I feel about it, really; or rather, I’m a bit conflicted. It’s not particularly classy, but on the other hand, it’s a tiny bit of unexpectedness in my personal presentation, and I cherish that. (Contrariness?) And my thoughts flip back and forth along that axis, with the occasional stop at what’s the big fucking deal? So I try to be a professional when that’s appropriate, and to not mortify C in public, and other than that: whatever is, is.
