It is important in any discussion of bad language to separate blasphemy from cursing. Nobody is advocating breaking the second commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” though, admittedly, it’s sometimes a challenge. Whatever you may say about the G-d of the Old Testament, he does not seem to have had much sense of humor. I mean, Jesus! According to Moses, Yahweh put “Thou shalt not kill” way down the list of commandments, at No. 5, but already at No. 2 he is abjuring us not to have any fun at his expense? I was in a church shortly after Hurricane Sandy, in the fall of 2012, when someone asked the priest how his congregation had fared during the storm. He answered that in Brooklyn Heights all was well but that his brethren in Dumbo had suffered bad flooding. “Oh, God!” I said—and then tried to inhale it back. Here I was in church, and I couldn’t think of any better way to register sympathy? I might have said “What a pity” or “God have mercy on the poor souls Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.” But these are not expressions that spring readily to mind, whereas the mild oath popped out right there in front of the tabernacle, like an egg I was helpless not to lay. I hoped that it might pass as a brief prayer.
I cannot help but admire, in retrospect, the restraint shown by my father as I was growing up. The strongest thing I ever heard him say when something went wrong—for instance, during a plumbing project, when the ceramic sink he was installing shattered into a thousand pieces—was “You dog.” Still, the way he said it, you knew that he was not invoking just any old household pet. Sometimes he said “Great Scott” or, when he was feeling especially vehement, “Great Scott Murgatroyd.” He was a fireman, and was scandalized once, responding to an alarm backstage at the Cleveland Play House, to hear Lauren Bacall, whom he admired—a lot—curse at the firemen for barging into her dressing room. He had never heard a woman say “fuck” (if that is what Ms. Bacall said; I’m sure she didn’t stammer at the firemen, “You . . . words!”). I certainly never heard him say “fuck”—not until he tried to drive in New Jersey.
My mother, on the other hand, was a font of vulgarity, a regular gusher. She would as soon call the neighbors assholes as tell them to mind their own business. Her epithet of choice for our nosy aunt was Fuzz Nuts. And she had vivid ideas about where her enemies might pound salt. When I took a course on Aristophanes in the original Greek I was reminded of my mother. I did not have a big enough Greek-English lexicon to translate a lot of the words in Peace, so I would go to Columbia’s Butler Library to use the huge Liddell & Scott, and I swear every other word I looked up in this temple of academe turned out to mean “fart.” I worried that when it was my turn to translate in class, I might, channeling my mother, say something so dirty it would have embarrassed Aristophanes.
I never cursed much myself until I was well into adulthood. I uttered a decorous little “crap” once, slamming my locker door in high school. I was saving the hard stuff for later. My friends and I went to see the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid over and over, and never failed to laugh at the scene when Robert Redford admits to Paul Newman that he can’t swim, but, to escape their trackers, he jumps off the cliff into the river anyway, bellowing “SHHHHHIIIIIIIIITTTT” on the way down.
In college, the upperclassmen talked about “getting their shit together”; we got “shit-faced” on Coke and Southern Comfort; “good shit” was excellent weed. One friend became worried when she realized that “fuck” was her default response to anything. If a little old lady on the bus started telling my friend her troubles, she found herself replying, “Fuck.” The old lady could be forgiven for not knowing that in context—a university town in New Jersey in the early seventies—“fuck” could mean “I’m sorry to hear that.” I first gave full vent to the urge to curse after terminating analysis, in 1996. I felt so free—I could change jobs, move from Queens to Manhattan, enjoy a little discretionary income because I wasn’t always shelling out to the shrink—and I just let fly with every joyous expletive I could think of. If someone mentioned The House of Mirth, I would say, “Edith Wharton blows,” or if a friend suggested reading Middlemarch my response was “George Eliot sucks.” It was so satisfying. The shell of prudery surrounding childhood and adolescence cracked wide open, and I emerged a fucking monarch butterfly. So I would say that analysis worked for me.
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