When did you use your first swear word?

In My Humble Opinion
1

At what age did you use a word that you knew would get you into trouble with a parent, if they heard you?

How much do you swear now? Does your job have any bearing on your use of profanity?

Do expletives fill holes in your vocabulary?

I don’t swear much. I’d never noticed that until my husband pointed it out. I have a pretty strong vocabulary, so I’m able to say what I need to without dipping into the language of my past. I remember saying “Hell” while riding my bike with some other kids when I was 15. I felt very guilty for doing it. I doubt I did it again until I was in my 20s.
I still feel a little ashamed to use [The Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV](At what age did you use a word that you knew would get you into trouble with a parent, if they heard you?

How much do you swear now? Does your job have any bearing on your use of profanity?

Do expletives fill holes in your vocabulary?

I don’t swear much. I’d never noticed that until my husband pointed it out. I have a pretty strong vocabulary, so I’m able to say what I need to without dipping into the language of my past. I remember saying “Hell” while riding my bike with some other kids when I was 15. I felt very guilty for doing it. I doubt I did it again until I was in my 20s.
I still feel a little ashamed to use [url=http://youtu.be/kyBH5oNQOS0). (If the link doesn’t work, it’s a YouTube video of George Carlin’s famous bit on the subject. You may have to google it yourself to see it.)

I think my broad vocabulary may come from wanting to distance myself from an uneducated family. My family swore like sailors. I was the Good Child. I never broke the rules, even ones that didn’t exist in our household.
They are all dead now, but the words that helped me escape poverty remain here, in my head.

Unfortunately, as I age, some of the simpler words escape me, and I end up using words that the person I’m speaking with doesn’t understand. This makes me come off as snobbish, but I’m not, I’m just a little forgetful.

Even when I was younger and still working, I was told many times how intimidating I was. The people saying it thought they were complimenting me, but it always me feel a little hurt and anxious. Remember, I was the Good Child who became the Nice Person as an adult.
All I ever wanted to do was broaden the knowledge the younger nurses lacked. I always tried to couch what I had to say in a non-condesending, helpful way. I was just trying to share tricks and safe short-cuts, just to help.

I guess I’ve always been a bit oblivious as to how I come across.

OK, I’ve said more than I intended. I’ll stop now. :cool:

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Fuck if I remember…

3

They tell me when I was five I called my grandmother a GD SObitching bastard. I never called her that again. I probably used that language even younger as when I lived with my parents I hung out on the pier where the men fished and swore a lot I imagine. I know That was the last time I used that language because at 5 was when my grandmother took me to raise. Thank goodness!

4

I remember the first time I cussed at my baby sister in my parents house. My Dad got to me in 2 strides & I bounced off three walls before I could stop.

I also remember the first time any of the 7 siblings told an off color joke in front of my parents. It was ‘that’ baby sister again when she had been in college for a few years.

3 of us older kids were in the room and we stopped breathing figuring we were going to see her die. The parents just laughed. We were dumbfounded that she did not die and more so that the parents got the joke in the first place.

Our house was never the same after that. My Dad even let me hear him tell some off color jokes at his business.

Both parents are gone now but I never have gotten relaxed about hard talk in front of them or any person that I think is senior to me. I’m 71 so there are not many anymore.

Stub my toe or bark my shin, the air turns blue for 100 yards all around.

5

I find myself doing the same thing when I’m alone, come to think about it. It actually makes those little annoying pains better, well, better than saying “oh gosh.” :smiley:

6

When I was five or six a friend told me that you could say “shit,” a word I wasn’t familiar with but that she told me was bad, with a period in the middle and it would make it automatically not-bad. Like “Sh-period-it.” And furthermore that you could say the period silently to yourself and it still counted even though it sounded like you were just saying “shit.”

So we had an enjoyable time cussing all afternoon, and she told me to try it when I got home. I instinctively knew my parents wouldn’t buy the period thing, so when my grandma was babysitting me, I challenged her to a game of Candy Land, deliberately lost, and said “Oh SHIT!”

Grandma was my biggest fan and she didn’t yell at me, she just said, “Oh, no…no. We don’t say that word. If you need something to say when you’re mad say ‘Oh pickle.’” I felt a little guilty because I played it off like I had no idea what I was saying when I really did it to get a reaction.

I cuss like a fucking sailor now though.

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So, are you a sailor? Or do you have a job that makes it allowable?

Critical care nurses talk like stevedores. Just, not me. I’m guessing there are others, but I’ve never met them.

8

I work in a restaurant kitchen. We talk like that too.

9

I can’t remember the word I used the first time; I just remember being told that I could not use some words, and that was one of them. Of course, this made me curious about what words were unacceptable, so I did the “research.” I loved dictionaries – especially our old @ 8-inch thick one – so research was fairly easy to do.

However, the most memorable word was used when my mother asked me what “bad word” someone had said to me. I told her and got a resounding smack in the face that told me not to say any such words to her again, even when asked.

My generation was strongly taught that if we developed our vocabulary enough, we would not need such words in order to express ourselves. I believed them. Now, I have no desire whatsoever to use swear words or their replacement words. I have been amazed, however, at the number of words I had used that were mere replacements for (what I call) coarse words.

I have a beautiful, godly first mother-in-law who has Alzheimer’s, and if she knew the words she now uses, she would be horrified. She has also become violent. I literally pray that I don’t do this.

In my family, among those who are near my age and up, we just don’t normally cuss, even in harsh situations. We’re not used to the words, so they don’t come to mind. However, my children and grandchildren use words I don’t use – words like gosh, crap, etc. I stay out of it; that’s up to them.

However, I must admit that I have, maybe about five times, used the word bitch when I was at a loss for a more honestly descriptive word – but only in front of my husband, in the privacy of our home. :smiley:

10

I don’t think I started using profanity until I was a teenager and working outside the house (though I still remember the shock I gave my mom in the 70s when I said “did he mean ‘fuck you’?” after she complained that another driver had given her the finger). I was raised in a pretty strict evangelical environment (Sunday school, Sunday and Wednesday worship services, religious “scouting,” and attended a private religious school), and never was really around anyone who cursed. Nothing about wanting/not wanting to shock someone… it was just so rare in my experience that the words didn’t easily come to mind when speaking.

I can curse pretty well now, but apparently it still is uncommon enough that people still say things like “Wow, never heard you say anything like that before!” when they hear me. I think that it’s the best of both worlds; I know and use the words, but their rarity adds an emphatic point that would be lost if they were words I constantly used. I still don’t use base words for body parts or anything, preferring proper terminology, which amused my ex-in-laws to no end.

As language has changed over the years, mild things that used to be considered expletives entered my vocabulary pretty easily. I remember when it was still considered outré that a TV show used the phrase “you suck,” and sure enough, that was a word I hadn’t really used, whereas now it’s NBD. Suck, piss, crap, etc. It still does shock me sometimes when I see my ultra-religious family members saying things like “I’m pissed!” on Facebook, though.

11

The earliest I can recall was maybe aged eleven or so, in the garden when I was on a ladder helping Dad with something and knocked a box of screws off the step I was working from.

“Fuck!” I said. “Oh, you know that one do you?” was my pa’s mild response, surprisingly I thought at the time.

No problem cursing in his company after that, but not in front of Mum or in public.

12

Family legend. I was still in a playpen and I had a plastic toy hammer. I had been watching my dad nail up plywood to enclose the basement stairs and evidently he ran into something frustrating, and I remembered his reaction, because a few moments later I hit the playpen with my toy hammer and announced, “A la gran puta!”

(A Spanish phrase meaning, roughly, “That big bitch! (or that big whore!)”

I don’t remember the event myself. (Although oddly enough, I remember the toy hammer clearly: blue plastic handle with a transparent head, shaped like a sledge hammer head, containing lots of multicolored beads).

13

I was nine, when my parents went off on a two week holiday. I was shipped off to my aunt’s and spent two weeks in the care of my teenaged cousins, considered to be very good boys, top students, very polite in adult company, altar boys, Boy Scouts, etc. They taught me some new words.

When I got back, my sister was annoying me (as she often did) and I angrily told her to fuck off. I didn’t get into any trouble, but my cousins did. It’s almost 40 years ago and they still give me grief about it.

14

I got my first (and last!) taste of soap at the tender age of six. The offensive phrase, IIRC, was “poopy pants.” (I know now that it wasn’t what I said as much as how I said it.) I regard that moment as the genesis of my ability to edit myself, depending on the situation, something my foul-mouthed wife never learned.

Growing up, my dad used what would now be described as “mild expletives” (no F-bombs), so my first cuss-word was “sh*t.” From that point, it was slippery-slope, all the way down. As time passed, I learned to be very creative with scatological speech.

Sometime in my forties, I began to realize that cussing did not add a lot to any discussion, so now, I have to be very angry (or hurt) to let it fly. Toe-stubbing releases the hounds.

15

Geez. It was probably “hell”, which I spelled out for a while before I dared to say it. Maybe age 6 or 7. Swear words were carefully not used in my family, and were reserved for the school playground. In those days, even the most boorish grownups would look around and survey the bystanders before uttering anything that is inappropriate for mixed company, and women never swore. I don’t think I ever heard a woman swear until I moved to Canada.

16

Probably that time (it was lunchtime on a Saturday), I was maybe 8 or 9 at the time, when my father knocked my head against the wall and gave me a bloody nose. But I’m not sure, because he never told me why he did it.

17

I’m 22, and while I technically have “used” swear words in the sense of saying something like “Robert said ***** today” or “The word ***** is vulgar”, to the best of my knowledge I have never used one to express surprise or pain or anger.

18

When I was 8 I started working for an uncle fixing beer trucks. I sometimes swore given the appropriate busted knuckle or whatever and no one blinked one way or the other. I rarely swear today but given the right situation, I could make R Lee Ermy blush. A guy was dragging a puppy down a sidewalk, yanking it every few feet, and I lit into him using everything nasty I could think of in three languages and fell back to just inventing sounds that sounded dirty. Some neighbors gave me a score of 9.6 - I would have gotten a perfect 10 except I repeated “brain-damaged mongoloid cocksucking prick son of a bitch” at least once.

19

Oh, maybe I can add my brother’s first swearing session - aged around two I believe (I was still a bun in the oven).

He had just been bought his first pair of shoes - Clarkes’ Sandles with a cute leather strap something like this: http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/236x/48/12/0f/48120f628924f0bcce7ec00372b35304.jpg I remember them as I inherited them a couple of years later.

Anyway, very proud of them and his improved walking ability, he was stomping around the house and tripped over the outstretched legs of our Dad who was reading the Telegraph in his armchair. “You and your bloody great boots!” exclaimed my Dad jokingly.

Off stomped my precocious brother into the kitchen, surprising my mother by mumbling “Bloody great boots! Bloody great boots!” as he went past.

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I didn’t really start using them with any regularity until I was posting stuff online. I find it’s easier to portray an angry tone that way, without having to change how I normally speak or use exclamation points and weird emphasis which just look silly, or smileys which always look too happy. As I got used to using it while angry, I started seeing a use for it just for a certain type of emphasis.

The angry version has spilled into real life, but not so much the emphasis version. Except maybe “ass,” which I didn’t really use so much before.

One other odd thing: I use fuck and shit and cunt a lot, and lesser swears like asshole and dick and bitch. But I still find “damn” and any use of religious profanity to be too strong for any use. Most people seem to see those as lesser swears.