When pregnant with her son, my friend thought she needed to learn to moderate her language – especially her swearing – before her son repeated inappropriate words at inopportune times.
My wife and I recently met up with my friend and her son while in Los Angeles for a concert, and I immediately dropped an f-bomb. No problem: instead of moderating her language, she and her husband defined rules, which her son immediately recited:
- Spell it correctly. Inspired by Dolly Parton‘s line in the movie Steel Magnolias: The nicest thing I can say about her is that all her tattoos are spelled correctly.
- Use it grammatically. Makes sense, my friend was an English major.
- Say it like you mean it. Again, makes sense, don’t sugar coat, make it worth the effort.
- Know your audience. Do you swear in front of Grandma? NO. Do you swear at your teachers or your parents? NO! Can you swear at the mess you made when you dropped a full picture of orange juice? Yeah, that’s appropriate.
For me, rule #4 is the most important: HR can raise a raucous if you swear in front of the wrong person. My personal Rule #5 is Swear to accentuate, not to insult, as That’s fucked is substantially different than You’re fucked.
I anxiously (hopefully) await South Park creating an episode that drops 100s of f-bombs instead of (the now lame) 100s of shits.
