Just for fun I put my blog into blog explosion. My thumbnail sketch wasn’t ready, but under my blog name was “partial profanity.”
I found this to be funny because I’ve been accused of not cursing enough in my writing. When I write about my teenage years there isn’t any cursing because I didn’t use words like “fuck.”
When I was fourteen and my sister was twelve, she put a hole in my bedroom door. I told her to fuck off and my father punished me, not her. (I’ve always resented that.) But it was many years before I began cursing. I might have been a teenage wild child, but I had an excellent clean vocabulary.
Towards the end of his life my father began cursing. Always on the look out for strokes or impending dementia I asked him why. “Because those words have lost all meaning.”
I was very excited as I thought the same thing. Any word is vulgar when used with hate; profanity isn’t vulgar when used almost as an exclamation point.
Let me get real. Most people don’t over analyze things–in this case–words to death. They use profanity (for lack of a better word) because it’s needed in context, they like to curse (again for lack…) or they have very limited vocabularies, in which case they must be very limited and probably boring.
In the interests of free speech I will continue to use profanities though in real life I’m much more likely to say “heck,” “golly gee,” or “gosh darn it.” I’ve seen Hairspray (the original movie) too many times and have a ten year old niece who uses the above words for affect.
But here’s to partial profanity.