November 23, 2013
As I was walking the dogs in the dog park at work today I got to thinking about the nature and application of curse words. It mostly came about because one of the labs was trying to eat something it really shouldn't be eating (I know, I know, it's a lab, what should I expect?) and I was calling the lab some improper names. It should be no surprise that the lab failed to respond to these monikers, which of course made me that much more frustrated.
Now, before you get on my case, I would like you to know that these words that I was calling the lab were "dork," "dumb butt," and other variations on that particular theme. So, on a scale of "big doo-doo head" to "mother-effer," the name wasn't actually that atrocious. And yet, one look at those sad, brown eyes and I was feeling all sorts of guilty for calling a lab that was shoveling another dog's feces into it's mouth a "stupid dork." Why was this, I wondered...
Then I thought way back, back to the dark days of daycare and when I first learned about curse words. Now, I'm not sure about all you people out there with stay-at-home moms (or dads, I suppose), but I learned a lot of my most important childhood lessons at daycare. For example, keying junk cars and proceeding to smash out their windshields with large rocks is a big-time no-no. (For the record, I wasn't the one who did the keying and/or windshield smashing. That was our local grade school delinquent. He was also responsible to the felling of several of the neighbor's aspen trees. He was quite a character.) Another one of the staples that you learn at daycare is a variety of curse words.
The funny thing is, back then, curse words had a completely different weight than they seem to nowadays. If you called one of the boys a doofus, some feelings were going to be seriously hurt. Same goes for "dork," "stupid," "weirdo," and, heaven forbid, "idiot." To tell someone to shut up was asking for a confrontation. There were numerous lovely euphemisms for shut up... "Shut your trap," "stuff it," "shut your pie hole." Now that I think about it, I still use a lot of these expressions.
It wasn't just that the curse words were a lot milder (I still remember my mother telling me that I could say "this stinks," but never "this sucks"); it was that the words held a lot more power back then. If someone called you stupid on the playground, this was a BIG DEAL. Yes, the capital letters matter. Even if it was in passing, rather than directly accusing, such as "don't be stupid" versus "you're such a stupid girl," it still really hurt. And yes, I will admit that my feelings got hurt once or twice on the playground, although you never would have caught me dead admitting it then.
And then I thought of myself nowadays. I will be the first to admit, mine is not the cleanest of mouths. If I stub my toe or have a huge cottonwood branch land right on my windshield (true story), I am chanting a litany of, "Eff, eff, eff... Effing effer, effity eff!" (On a related tangent, I have decided that the "eff" word is the most versatile curse word in the English language. Think about how many parts of speech that verb can be transformed into... If it wasn't so vulgar, it would be almost admirable.) One of my favorite expressions? "No shit Sherlock." Or, even better, "And then shit hit the fan."
It's funny, because as soon as you think that you have encountered all the curse words that there are to be had, you find another variation, combination, or new word in general that makes you sit back and go, "Huh." Example? When I was in high school, I was a part of the concert choir. I usually stuck with people either in cross country or the honors program, so there were many people in choir who I only met in choir class. And let me tell you, choir people can be crazy.
We were at a workshop/festival and I was sitting in the audience because the director was working with another section of the choir. One of the senior girls was sitting in front of me, and I'm fairly sure she was on something that day. Don't get me wrong, sweetest girl ever, fantastic singer, funny as hell, but she must have been on crack or pot or sloshed or at the very least on a coffee high, because she had an inordinate amount of energy and absolutely no mind-to-mouth filter. The weirdest thing about this whole experience is that typically she never talked to me. But that day, she turned around and began chatting me up. She asked how my day was, if I had any plans that weekend. Then she leaned over and stated, "Asshat."
That was it. Asshat. I was so dumbfounded I forgot to even be offended. I was too busy trying to figure what kind of insult "asshat" was. Seriously. If any of you out there can tell me exactly what the crap that is supposed to mean, I would appreciate it. So I ended up being more amused than anything. I think she called me an asshat at least three or four more times before we had to break for lunch. And I couldn't for the life of me explain to you exactly what prompted her to call me that. I didn't even talk to her enough to merit being called a retard, much less an asshat. So I chose to be vaguely amused and treated the rest of the conversation as a social experiment. How many times will the slightly-insane senior call me a ridiculous curse word before she either gets bored or comes up with a new variation?
So when I was sitting there looking into the brown eyes of the penitent black lab who was trying to consume a disturbing amount of dog shit, I couldn't just sit there and call her a dork. It was too much like that time I made a boy cry on the playground when I called him a stupid doofus. Or something of that nature. In my defense, he was a little crybaby anyways... Moving on... My point is, isn't it strange how the spectrum of curse words can apply to different times and situations in our lives? I call my roommate a dork because she can't walk in a pair of high heels, and it's an endearment. I call a lab with soulful brown eyes a dork, and I feel like the worst kind of bully. Sometimes I am amazed by all the intricacies that are contained in a genre of words that are, by nature, quite vulgar. That's English for you folks.
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