Curse words are a very weird phenomenon. In every language (that I know of), there is a small collection of words whose only purpose is to allow us as humans to vent stress, anger, and humiliation. They are healthy and they sound blisteringly perfect.
And they provide college students with a way to completely erase the color from their rhetoric. Using “fucking” in place of all the many other modifiers that we as English-speakers were blessed with, using “shit” as the vehicle of every comparison from “I am tired as shit” to “This paper is long as shit” means sounding like an idiot, to me. Surely, I often think to myself, it depends on which individual shit you’re talking about. In many ways, the beauty of the curse word is being eroded away by over-use, and this is a severe problem as there is no inherent value to be found within these words. That is to say, the actual sounds of curse words are not what makes them offensive.
This is part of my problem with profanity being a sin of sorts. What does God do if a Chinese person utters the syllable “shit” inside a church? Or if a baby does? What happens? Does that go on our checklist of Pros and Cons that St. Peter examines upon our death? I hope not.
I teach reading to kids with learning differences (such as autism, or dyslexia). It’s my job, and I love it because of stuff like this:
Once I was teaching a kid named Timothy; we were reading short little stories like,
“The elephant was very very big! He wrapped his trunk around a tree, and pulled. The tree came out of the ground!”
Word by word, we plowed through these stories, as Timothy was getting more and more proficient with his ability to decipher sentences. My boss Sarah approached and said, “Let’s have a look at how Timothy is doing!” She sits down between Timothy and me, opens the book to a new story, and prompts Timothy to read it.
The story was: “Jack and Ben went to sit on a big rock. The rock moved when they sat on it! It was not a rock, it was a turtle.”
Timothy read the first sentence, “Jack and Ben went to sit on a big cock.”
Now, this is an entirely reasonable mistake, a lower-case “r” looks a lot like a “c.” It was perfectly understandable, as errors go, and my boss Sarah knew this. She patiently stopped him, re-read the story to him including the mistake he had made, and asked if there was something that didn’t sound quite right. She didn’t so much as blink as she read the final word to him.
What’s wholly embarrassing about this story is that there are three people sitting at this desk.
1. A 9 year old earnestly putting forth his best effort to learn how to read
2. A 20 something professional instructor, helping him learn with a steady mind, and a patient manner.
3. And 20 year old Teachy McGrown-Up to her left, looking like this:
I am such an inspiration.
I mean, what a perfect sentence! We often get little mix-ups like kids who read “fangs” as “fags,” or “chit” as “shit,” but a whole sentence that sounds perfectly designed to conduct mischief? Welcome aboard, Captain Hilarity!
But my point is, the physical sounds behind curse words (and, really, all words) are not in themselves the big No-No. Timothy is not going to burn for his reading error, or I have a much severer problem with God than I thought. The offensive aspect must be the intention behind them. This goes for all of language, I suppose, and it's an issue that crops up all the time as we swim through the bog of death-traps that is Political-Correctness. What was inherently insulting about the word "secretary?" Why must we now call them... what is it, now? Desk Technicians? If anyone knows, please tell me, because I have absolutely no clue. For further details on this idea, watch a LOT of South Park episodes.
I'm serious about that secretary thing.
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