I was the 5th (and last) child in our household and was born in 1961. We never used profanity in our house, my parents never cursed. In fact, even in the 90’s, my father had some moving men sent back to the moving company because they used foul language in front of my mother. “Geeze” wasn’t allowed because it was too close to “Jesus”. My sister got her mouth washed out with soap for saying someone “kicked the bucket”. As adults, I was riding in the car with a sister and she looked over at another car in the parking lot and said “That bastard.” I was shocked - we just didn’t use such language, even when by ourselves. When I said, “I think that’s a little harsh, don’t you?” She was confused, and it turned out she was asking if that way might be faster. I’m 64 now, and a lifetime of habit, and I just don’t feel the need to cuss.
I vaguely recall Kurt Vonnegut writing that when he was a kid, calling someone a “motherfucker” was considered a pretty serious insult.
‘Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker.’ The last word was still a novelty in the speech of white people in 1944. It was fresh and astonishing to Billy, who had never fucked anybody— and it did its job. It woke him up and got him off the road.
I grew up as a Mormon in a very Mormon community in Utah. I don’t remember golly, gee, gosh, etc. but I don’t know for sure.
When I was a missionary (19 years old) the other missionaries were using slang terms. The one I remember was “fetch” (the F word). I can’t remember the other ones, but I think there was a “S word" and maybe a couple more.
So, in what was supposed to be the spiritual highlight of my life I picked up slang terms for profane words (and knew what they represented).
As a kid in the 1960s, I never heard any of those from other kids. I do remember one kid calling another kid a “basster.” Heard the F-bomb for the first time in 1970, and that was from other kids.
I can remember when the Charlie Daniel Band song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” came out (1979, wikipedia tells me). It was an illicit thrill to find one of the radio stations that would play the original version, in which Johnny called the Devil “you son of a bitch,” versus the censored version where he called him a “son of a gun.” Son of a bitch was just not something that you heard in those days, and you would certainly never let your mom catch you listening to a song that included such language.
I can also remember, in my early teens, discussing with other kids whether particular books or movies had “bad words” in them. By “bad words,” we mean things like “damn” or “hell.”
Ooh, that reminds me of the time my cousins and i were in my parents’ library, and we found the f word, in print! In one of the books (Love Story). That expedition to find the forbidden word was at least half an hour of 3 kids’ time.
I can’t imagine my father (born 1948) ever using words like “golly”, “gee” or “gosh”. His parents were working-class New Yorkers, and would never have put up with such language in their fucking house.
My mother, though - her parents had upper-middle-class pretensions, and she had a very finely honed sense of sarcasm. I can see her saying “golly” ironically.
Not from NYC and bit older than your Dad, but yeah; that’s my Dad’s story too. And hence mine. I got a little more genteel in college, then an almost-decade in the military undid all that and more.
