Swearing was forbidden in our house when I was growing up. I can remember my dad using a very, very occasional “damn” or “hell,” but hardly ever. My mom, never. We weren’t even allowed to say that we “hated” something - my mom didn’t like the word “hate” or its variants, so my sisters and I would say that we “intensely disliked” something. “Shut up” was simply rude and not to be said to anyone. Couldn’t use the Lord’s name in vain. I don’t remember us being particularly frustrated by my parents’ limits on our self-expression, though.
For my own boys (ages 10-7-4), I have the same rules now, except that I don’t mind them saying “hate” now and again. I’ve watched some PG-13 and R-rated action-adventure movies with my eldest son, who’s pretty mature, and have reminded him that I don’t want to hear him using language like that (the F-bomb was dropped a couple of dozen times in Die Hard 3, which we watched last week, for instance).
Growing up, my dad RARELY swore. I maybe heard him say damn 5 times. One time on the golf course I heard him say fuck, and was shocked. Made me wonder if he cussed around his friends, at work, etc.
My mom NEVER swore. When she was really mad she might spell out d-a-m-n or h-e-l-l. Always thought that was weird. I got my mouth washed out several times.
I’ve got a real potty mouth. Tried to watch it pretty much when our kids were young. Remember having the discussion around the table when they wanted to know what was “the worst swear.” Didn’t have a big problem with the kids using swearing appropriately - shit or damn when mad or frustrated, but tried to discourage the over casual sucks. And told them out of politeness they should watch their language around other people who might be offended.
But now that they are in their late teens, we all pretty much cuss like a bunch of longshoremen.
My parents were pretty strict when it came to language as my brother and I grew up. When Dad first heard me say something “sucked,” he sternly sat me down and told me exactly what that meant and why I shouldn’t say it. I do believe I heard him say ‘damn’ once, as in “This damn tv!” uttered under his breath when he thought no one else could hear him (I did). I’ve never heard his parents say anything remotely close to swearing. The thought even gives me the hives.
I’ve heard my mom use ‘shit’ ‘damn’ and ‘ass’ a lot more liberally as I’ve grown up, but nothing stronger in my presence. I, on the other hand, have sworn more than I’m proud of in front of her, even going so far to drop the F bomb when talking to her once–granted, it was on the phone, we were half a country apart and talking about my very recent ex-wife, so she let me get away with it that once. Her parents were quite generous with the racial comments and swear lingo.
Dad was such a stickler for words and how to properly say them that even now my friends give me crap about how I describe a scary movie. My dad taught me that its a ‘Har-rer’ movie, not a ‘whore-er’ movie. The latter sounds too much like it sounds, like a whore movie.
I swear like a sailor at times. The best I can do is reduce it a bit or say nothing. The worse my ticks the worse the swearing. I can refrain from typing it though, so if you see it here I want to type it. Of course you can only swear what you hear around you in the first place. It’s something I have to live with, and I don’t use my illness as a reason to flaunt swearing in peoples faces. Too many people that have the problem think saying they can’t stop it is a pardon to never take the responsibility, that it’s obnoxious, and people don’t have to put up with it. I ran into a person that bragged about having no control and reveled in the carnage he could create, while expecting the people around him not to react negatively, because he had a illness. When I couldn’t think well a few years ago, the filler word in a sentence while I thought was fuck. A ten word sentence may have had five fucks in it. When I couldn’t think of simple words like food or baby, I could manage saying fuck 20 times in a row. I cringe at the sentences I constructed when I came back two years ago. I literally didn’t know the difference between words. I also found that I still typed sentences that I wasn’t trying to type and that’s unsettling. Ok break from the hijack.
My parents rarely swore. My mom’s mother would, once in a while, which seemed to embarrass my mom. (She was a farm girl who moved to the big city.) They still don’t generally swear around me, but it’s more common than when I was a child.
My kids are young enough that they are still just learning the basic set of swear words. We don’t swear at home. (I apologize to them, if I let a rare one slip.) We consider “shut up” to be rude enough for a reprimand, but not punishment. Neither of them has gone ballistic at either parent yet, but I expect it will happen as my daughter enters the tweens.
Growing up we joked that my mom’s favorite word was shit. I said it once or twice but didn’t really curse. I once said “freak” in a way that made my mom think I had said “fuck” but after asking me to repeat myself she just said that I needed to watch my language. I omitted swear words when singing along to music and my parents thought it was hilarious.
In my house we have words that you shouldn’t use that much, but not curse words. My 6 y/o understands that some words make other grownups very uncomfortable and that he would be in trouble for saying them at school. It’s a lesson that is less about swearing, and more about “you are in their house, follow their rules” - but I did have to draw the line the other night when on a car trip and my son piped up “When are we going to have dinner? I’m really fucking hungry!” And the only reason he knew to say it was because he had heard me say it so I didn’t get mad, just told him that fucking is considered a bad word and I’d like him not to say it.
And then I told my mom and she thought it was hilarious and both she and my dad said what they’ve said since I was little - at least he used it in context.
They are odd people sometimes.
ETA - my son has asked that we stop using “oh my god” or any other “god’s name in vein” swear around him because it offends him as a Christian. The only one in the family.
I was in my teens before I ever heard my dad swear. Mom ruled the roost, and there was no swearing in the house. Quite a change from her sister, who was my sitter for many of my pre-teen years. She swore abundantly. Mom, at her angriest, might throw out a ‘dang’.
Now that I’m (much) older, Dad will occasionally use colorful metaphors, but not often. Mom still won’t. My wife doesn’t curse; neither do my in-laws (who live with us). Thus, there is very little cursing in our household, though not as strict as when I was a child. I rarely curse, which helps to let everyone know I’m really pissed when I do.
Amusing story about my son from a few years back. As I said, I’m not quite as strict with the cursing as my parents were. So he decides to try using a mostly innocuous word (one which never would have flown in my youth and which we rarely use in our home): ‘heck’. He used it, then looked at me to gauge my reaction. I figured that I’ve got bigger fish to fry than the word ‘heck’, so I let it go. Next thing I know, he’s using it every other sentence. Sometimes, the boy ain’t so bright; it’s not like he was 6 or 8 - he was 12 or 13 when he tried this. Went from something I wouldn’t really complain about to something that will not be used.
Oh, that reminds me! Mom once told us she had no problem with us saying a swear word if it was in a song. Thereafter it was not uncommon to hear us singing along in the car: “He was bad, bad, Leroy Brown…baddest man in the whole damn town…”
My father comes from a hard-scrabble family and he and his brothers can cuss with the best of them. We were regularly exposed to it as a kid. Oddly enough, my father’s mother would never have dreamed of using the language her sons did.
My mother very rarely curses - the occasional “damn” is about it. Her mother and aunts, on the other hand, could cuss like sailors and did with gusto. My great aunt’s favorite expression (whether to express extreme pleasure, disgust, anger, or just about anything else) was “Aww shit.”
My mom had a fierce temper, but she wouldn’t swear around us kids. Her favorite expression was "God…(long pause while my mom valiantly struggled against saying “dammit all to Hell!)…bless America!!!”
My dad never swore. His fiercest expression is “Son of a gun!,” which I now find myself saying all the time.
Up until I was six I don’t remember knowing about swearing at all. That year my parents divorced and mom, sis, and I moved in with my grandparents. Kids at school swore, but swearing didn’t happen in the house. I can recall two different incidents, each involving one of my grandparents saying the word “Damn”, but nothing “worse”. After we moved to our own place we could watch movies with swearing in them, but we still didn’t swear at home until. . .my older sister left for college. Why is still a mystery to me, but as soon as she left my mom started cursing a blue streak, and I could curse in front of her without consequence. (I was about 14 then)
My parents swore all the time, but I remember a time shortly before my mother died(so I was 10 or 11), when I said “hell” in front of her, and she slapped me across the face. First and last time I ever cursed in her presence.
Growing up in Utah, I learned all sorts of different ways to swear without swearing.
“It’s flipping cold!”
“Got down! Sat on a bench!”
“FUDGE!”
“What the heck?!”
What the heck is my favorite. I still say it all the time and my husband still thinks I’m weird.
Both of my parents swore like sailors on shore leave. I’ve been punished for many, many things, but I was never punished for swearing. I never swore at my parents (I didn’t have a deathwish) but I swore around them all the time. It wasn’t really a big deal. But even at a young age, I understood there were some people you just didn’t swear around, I don’t remember every swearing in front of my grandparents or at school.
So yeah, I swear all the time. Maybe even every other word. My husband, however, never swears. Ever. When he does swear, I know that he is seriously, seriously angry. When I swear, it’s only a sign that I’m awake.
My grandmother never swore either. But I still vividly recall the year we were there for Thanksgiving and she called the turkey a cocksucker. I had only recently teased out the meaning of cocksucker, and honestly, it was the funniest thing I had ever heard in my entire life. I still laugh when I think of her bending over the stove, her face twisted with concentration, exclaiming “You cocksucker!”
I don’t remember it myself, but I’ve heard from my mom that, when I was in preschool, I came home from once with a note about how I’d used “the s-word” at school. Mom gave me a big lecture about how some words shouldn’t be used, and what was and wasn’t appropriate, and just generally read me the riot act. After it was all over, I mumbled, “Okay, I won’t tell Kevin he’s stupid anymore.” A good lesson in the futility of euphamism, I think.
Absent that one incident, swearing never seemed to bother them much. At around the same age as the above incident, I distinctly remember my mother calling a driver who cut her off a “stunned cunt.” I was never punished for swearing, but they did for disrespect. I could say, “This toy is a piece of shit,” without retribution, so long as I didn’t say it in front of the relative who’d just given it to me for Christmas. If I told an adult to fuck off (as a kid did in the thread that inspired this one) my parents would first interrogate me to determine if said adult deserved being told to fuck off. If he did, then I hadn’t done anything wrong. It really impressed on me the idea that being older than me wasn’t the same as being smarter, nicer, or better than me, which I think was another good lesson.
I came from a family where the use of the phrase “Shut up!” was verbotten. Even when trying to get the dog to be quiet. The dog would be told to “hush up.” There weren’t any beatings, or such. Just the parental long-suffering look, and “We don’t use that phrase.”
I learned when I was a teen that it’s all my own fault, anyways - I told my grandfather to shut up, and he ended up chasing me around my grandparent’s kitchen. I even caroled, to my grandmother, “Him no get me!” FWIW, if my grandfather had caught me I don’t think there would have been anything more than a spanking - which I don’t think is necessarily abuse.
More powerful swear words were discouraged in much the same way, while I was a child. As a teen, I started hearing them, but never really got into using them.
Until I enlisted in the Navy at age 20. I came out dropping cuss words everywhere. I remember being on leave one time, visiting my parents while they had guests over, consisting of one of my father’s co-workers, his wife and two children aged about 12-15. I was watching my language, and particularly idiom, so closely I was nearly mute! (I remember at one point I started to say something, realized where it was going, and that it was most emphatically not suitable for the ears of young teens, IMNSHO, and tried to stop. My father’s co-worker was intrigued and wanted to know what it was that I’d started to say. It took me a few minutes, with my father’s help, to convince him that it really wasn’t something he needed to hear. Alas, now, I can’t recall what exactly I was about to say.)
Since then I’ve gotten back into the habit I’d has a teen of using either puns or Britisms to allow me to vent when I need to, without having make sure that little pitchers can’t hear me.
What words were considered verboten (the linked thread mentioned saying “shut up” and the rolling of one’s eyes as grounds for punishment for some.) :
All ‘curse words’, even those as benign as ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ were considered grounds for punishment at my house!
The same goes for rolling the eyes at my parents. Doing the eyeroll would get you whacked even faster than saying ‘damnit’. So would ‘heavily sighing’. Same deal with that.
The words ‘fuck’ (or any version of 'fuck) and ‘shit’ were considered a cardinal sin and you’d REALLY get into trouble for saying those. There was also no ‘flipping of the bird’ at my house, either. That’d get you whacked, too.
Did you have a “swearing jar” in which one deposits a quarter or some other incentive to discourage profanity in your household? (who got the money and what did it get spent on if you did?) :
Are you kidding?! No way. What were the punishments doled out for saying certain words? :
Depending on the word (or action), you’d usually just get backhanded. My mom would have been a star if she had played tennis, as she had a WICKED backhand.
Mom did the backhand, Dad did the beatings.
Saying the words ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ would get you a beating, and the degree of the beating would depend on the degree of my step-dad’s drunkenness. At what age did your parents relax the rules and how often did your parents themselves swear in your presence?
After we were moved out, whatever age that might have been, then you could swear to your heart’s content…or if you went to war while you lived at home (Two of my step-brothers went to 'Nam, and they were adults when they returned home, but moved out quickly thereafter), and they could curse as much as they liked.
Our parents had no problem with that.
My parents always cursed, but that was ok. It was the ‘Do as I say, not do as I do’ type deal.
Now, I cuss enough to make a Marine blush, and mom says ‘fuck’ as much as I do, and I have NO qualms about cussing in her presence.
My step-dad is dead, and I’m SO THRILLED about that fact, I’m giddy! Even after several years!
My parents swear like sailors, and have as long as I can remember. But it’s only in the last year or so (I’m 33) that I’ve felt comfortable swearing in front of them. I NEVER swore in front of them as a kid. I was never told not to, that I recall, I just… didn’t.
Dad swore constantly. Mom if she needed to for emphasis. I didn’t when I was younger. My mom is a pincher. She pinches me on the really sensitive underbelly of my upper arm if I am doing something that she doesn’t like. With her southern sensibilities, it was more about what happened in public. Cursing children make the family look really trashy. Now that I’m grown up and we’re not in public I am free to spew as much verbal diarrhea forth as I want. Mom hates certain phrases that I use such as “fuck me/fuck me running” and “suck my dick/jiggle my balls” that still gets me pinched. (i’m female)
I was on the bus yesterday and I did a little mecca lecca high to the gods that my parents raised me well. There were these kids going to middle school must have been 12 or 13 and they were SO LOUD and they were using language worthing of a quentin tarantino film and it was just awful. Just screaming things at each other 'YOU AINT GETTING SHIT NIGGER" I was shocked.
My mom, “Do you know what that means?”
I said, “Yeah, he’s a jerk!”
She said, “Well no it doesn’t.” Just never mind what it means."
Me:
Me: so which word is bad, “jerk” or “off”?
Mom: “Sit in the corner!”
kiddoeaddi, now an adult, wouldn’t dream of swearing in polite company, but around me she swears like a [del]sail[/del] Doper. I guess it’s because I once told her, when she was about 13, that I’d rather hear the “F” word on an endless loop than a double negative or “she don’t.”
Since the time she could first talk, Kizarvexilla has had an amazing swear word filter on her vocabulary. I’m really not certain as to how this came about, because foul language has never really been an issue in my family. For as long as I can remember, she has had an uncanny knack for knowing which words uttered in her presence were the ones she wasn’t supposed to repeat, and gone out of her way to avoid saying them. Example:
My Brother Jim: Hey Kiz! Pass me that blanket. I’m about to lose my cojones from freezerburn. Me: Kizarvexilla, what did your uncle just say? Kizarvexilla: He says he’s really cold.
She was five when this conversation took place.
She’s eight now, and just started third grade. And whenever someone cuts loose with a swear word in the house, her little voice inevitably pops up with “I heard that!”
