Please refer to A Child’s View Of Cussing
Started: 07-14-2003, 12:48 PM by Zeldar
And closed:
I initially took the term “curse word” literally. As in the turn-you-into-a-newt type of curse. Being a rationalist kid, I went around telling people that I wasn’t afraid of curses.
Two stories on this topic:
First one - I grew up living next door to a bait shop and fishing tackle store run by a crusty old man who was 90 years older than God. He had 4 ponds dug behind the shop where he raised his own bait, and he had the coolest cat in the world. Old Pete had about 7 toes on each foot, and for me and my friends, that was (almost) better than a new tube of BBs for our BB guns. But I digress…
Being a bait shop, the place attracted fishermen, who are not exactly known for being choir boys. Go check out Burgess Meredith’s role in “Grumpy Old Men” to see a pretty good representation of my neighbor. Any way, one day when I was about 8 years old, I was over there, hanging out, and a group of the regulars were there doing whatever fishermen do when they’re not on the water. One was talking about his “fuckin’ truck”. I had heard the word and been told by a 4th grader what it meant already, but thought that this information was the private purview of just the guys I went to school with. My first thought was “THEY know about this too? I thought it was just us guys!”
Second story - not something that happened to me, but was related to me by a neighbor.
They decided to get a parrot - a blue and yellow macaw. It’s a gorgeous bird. The pet shop said that before they could take it home, they needed to spend time with it, get acquainted with it, and get the bird accustomed to them. Otherwise, they could just as likely lose a finger when they got it home. This bird has a beak that can open a steel can. When he’s mad, he chews through wooden dowels in his stand in about 5 minutes. I wouldn’t want it mad at me.
These birds also have a fairly good intellect. Go find the book “Alex and Me” for some background if you want, or search for “Alex the african grey parrot” on Youtube for a quick bit of info. The point is, the bird could talk, and use words in context to the situation.
So after several weeks of working with the bird, talking to it, getting it used to them, etc, The Day came. They covered the cage with a blanket, and carried it out to the van. Once inside, they removed the blanket. The bird was quiet for a minute, looked around the van, and said, “fuck”.
They’ve never heard him say it again.
RalfCoder, you surely know how to tell a story!
A friend of a friend used to work in a school for kids with special needs. Not so much learning disabilities as emotional problems, although I guess there was a fair bit of overlap. Anyway, they had one kid who’d have massive tantrums. I mean the kind where you have to literally sit on the kid to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself or others, or simply destroy everything within reach. The kid would curse up a storm when he did it, too - all the regular curse words: shit, fuck, cock, cunt, etc. etc.
One day, something sets him off, and it’s worse then ever. It takes two of the teachers to hold him down until he wears himself out. He’s already run through his usual gamut of swear words, and they apparently didn’t adequately express his frustrations. He’s gone all red faced, and is just making choking noises, while he gears up to the ultimate in foul imagery, the one phrase that, in context of the other words he’s learned are unacceptable, must be the Holy Grail of swears, the nuclear option of naughty words. The kid throws back his head and starts screaming, at the top of his lungs, “Naked lady! Naked lady! Naked lady!”
Thank you, Zoe!
I had a similar reaction to the notion of “cursing” and have never known the fine points of the subdivisions of dirty words and naughty expressions:
Before checking the thesaurus here are the ones I recall:
swear
oath
sailor talk
street talk
filth
4-letter words
blue language
Now, with help from the book:
expletive
invective
abuse
scurrility
profanity
foul language
sailor’s blessing
execrate
calumny
And there are others!
Stories about a friend, who declines to watch her tongue around her children, and then sometimes gets embarassed by the consequences.
She has three children, six, eight, and eleven. The littlest one is Clark.
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Mom is driving Clark and a young friend to Grandma’s after school. Young friend is horrified that Clark is getting into the front seat–he’s never allowed to sit in the front seat (airbag concerns(I think)). Clark says “it’s ok, it’s a short drive, and Mom hardly even cusses on it”.
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Clark comes home from school recently all happy–he and a friend have figured out the greatest curse word ever. You take the non swear part of one word, add it to the non-swear part of another word, and you get a word that doesn’t have any swears in it, so you can’t get in trouble for using it.
The word in question “jackhole”–which is not in fact a word which this six year old is permitted to use. Mom gets to swear, not him. She’s not quite as fussy as her mother was about not allowing “darn” for “damn” (because you MEAN damn) but no, this is not acceptable language. Nice try, though.
- The eight year old–Missy-- had an opportunity to go to “Safety City” which apparently is a large gymnasium outfitted with traffic lights, “roads” and an abundance of tricycles. Kids get to have fun and practice the rules of the road.
Missy found it neccessary to “outfit” her trike with a horn, since it didn’t come with one, she said “Meep, meep” frequently and loudly. I’m not sure she used any actual cusswords, but she did say things like “The light’s not getting any greener, lady”. And had to be asked to sit out for a while and calm herself down.
After school, the teacher has a quiet word with Mom. Who tries to casually and without quite lying indicate that perhaps it is her husband whose behavior as driver was being imitated.
Teacher “Oh, does your husband have a New York accent too?”
Busted.
When I was a very small child, my family used curse words, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to use them. And I was a very rules-oriented child, so I wouldn’t have dreamed of ever swearing. Except one day when I was about four years old…
My mom was driving down the freeway, I was in the passenger seat. Can’t remember where we were going, but we were about 10 minutes away from home, and not having a conversation, when my mom suddenly broke the silence by saying “Goddamn it!”
I had no idea why she said this, so I naturally responded with “Goddamn what, Mommy?”
And then realized what I’d said, and burst into tears. My mom was stifling giggles for the rest of the car trip.
My daughter’s first swear word was my fault.
We took a couple of bags of bread down to the park to feed the geese. It was spring, and the goslings were just starting to run around. Three year old humans really like the idea of feeding cute baby animals. Grown up Canada Geese are not nearly as cute as the little ones, but I’m no prize either.
Things went pretty well for the first bit, the adult geese were wary of the humans being around their little ones, and I was keeping a sharp eye on them, but bread was exchanged for cute and a good time was had by all. If the geese started getting too close or being aggressive, I’d just shake the bag we had the bread in at them and they’d move away.
There was one gander, however, who decided that a human shorter than he was carrying a handful of bread was a prime target for a little mugging. He hissed, dropped his neck down, and charged. I stepped in and kicked at him, telling him to “Back the fuck up!” My daughter decided to help out by saying “Yeah! Bat fut up!”
I could tell that neither she or the geese were traumatized by the event, because later on that year we went to a barbecue in the same park, and when the meat was late she decided she was going to hunt a goose for us to cook. She spent an hour or so stalking geese with a water bottle. They evaded the mighty huntress by the clever technique of walking just slightly faster than she could.
When my brother and I were about 11, we were enjoying our summer holiday with our stepbrother and stepsister, who were about the same age. After listening to a lot of arguments between us as to whether or not we had actually said a cuss word, our stepsiblings quite reasonably said, “Listen. You both cuss. Are you going to tattle on each other all your lives, or would you rather be able to cuss freely?”
We saw the sense in this, and it was agreed that each of us should say a swear word and not tell on each other to seal the deal. My brother immediately said, “Shit.” Here it was…my moment…I drew out the tension as I entertained the thought of telling on my brother anyway…then went for the big time with a cheerful “Fuck!”
Thanks, Sarah and J.C.! Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits…
When I was a tyke, a friend and I somehow decided that if you flip someone the bird with your left hand, it didn’t “count”. I have no idea how we came to this conclusion. We went around cheerfully displaying our left middle fingers confident that no one could get mad at us. We were quickly disabused of that notion.