I only heard him say it once. He was on a ladder in the family room installing a skylight. Dad’s long, jean-clad legs filled the center of the room, his shoulders and chest swallowed by the hole in the ceiling.
I only heard him say it once. He was on a ladder in the family room installing a skylight. Dad’s long, jean-clad legs filled the center of the room, his shoulders and chest swallowed by the hole in the ceiling.
I heard a fatal crack, then the expletive “F” word. I was 20 years old. This was the first time I’d ever heard my Naval officer father say a word my three sisters and brother used a dozen times a day.
With a Catholic father who read the Psalms daily and a mother who at worst might say s— if she’s in need of stitches — where did we get our potty mouths?
When my husband and I first met he blamed the Irish Pub where I worked nights. I know better. My sailor’s mouth developed before I began my 20-year stint in restaurants. I blame it on coming of age in Southern California and the company I kept as a teenager.
That old saying, “a mouth like a sailor” is a fragment sentence — the saying should go, “a mouth like a sailor’s daughter.”
Last month when I turned 46 I decided it was time to clean up my language. There’s a certain age range when a person can get away with the prolific use of cuss words. I’m not alarmed when I hear teenagers, college students or even the 30-something crowd cursing in public. But even I have to confess, when I hear f— come from the mouth of someone my age (dare I say closing in on 50) it startles me.
An awareness of my potty mouth began around three years ago while working at Kaua‘i Pasta. John Heller runs a Christian establishment. He made it clear on my first day that cursing was not tolerated. The only exception to the rule was if I had a really good dirty joke, in which case I’d warn John that it had racy language. He’d temporarily lift “the dirty word ban” for the three minutes it took me to tell the joke. I must make one other confession — there’s nothing quite so gratifying as telling a dirty joke to a Christian who appreciates dirty jokes. Within a month of working for John, my husband noted how much my vocabulary had cleaned up.
Then I came to work at The Garden Island. I still curse when I get excited and didn’t think much of it until our human resource person brought it to my attention. Being in the business of words you’d think I could be more creative then to lean heavily on obscenity as a form of expression. In defense of the curse word, they are easy to remember and versatile. You don’t have to know syntax to use them. In fact you don’t even have to know parts of speech since so many of them work as noun, verb and adjective.
Laziness is one reason I depend on curse words. The second reason is a loss of control. When I get excited, rather then search for another word to express my gusto, I just throw in an expletive to show just how very excited or angry I am, or was. It’s been nearly a month since setting my intention to quit cursing. Luckily no one is counting how many times I’ve slipped up. But the first step toward change is awareness. I’ve come to notice that I still cuss a lot in my head when I’m talking to myself. Maybe my dad used the “F” word in his internal dialogue too. I’ll never know. What I do know is that in 44 years of knowing him, I heard him say it once.
