How much of a potty mouth are you?<\/p>\n
Parents: have your offspring ever heard you swear, or worse, have they learned to swear from you?<\/p>\n
Why is there even such a concept as swear words? (Don\u2019t expect an answer to that here!)<\/p>\n
This past weekend (March 25th), I was involved in a Monty Python and the Holy Grail interactive movie evening. People were encouraged to come dressed in Monty Python attire and to bring coconut shells, cuddly toys (preferably farm animals) and other paraphernalia. We showed the movie, and threw in three sketches from the TV show to start, split, and end the evening.<\/p>\n
Mrs. H. came dressed as the witch that everyone wanted to burn. The Hatchlings (circa 30 years old) came as a killer bunny and a gumby respectively. The Hatchling-in-law also came as a gumby. The whole fam damily was there.<\/p>\n
And if that wasn\u2019t enough, one of my ex-cub scouts (now 13 years old and an avid Monty Python fan) was also in attendance.<\/p>\n
It fell to me to perform a sketch at the intermission. What better choice than the Albatross sketch? As every MP fan worth his\/her salt knows, the live versions of this sketch include the F-bomb. The Hollywood Bowl version also includes the C-bomb. The TV version, by comparison, is tame, and to a certain extent, fizzles out at the end. So I decided to go with the Drury Lane version.<\/p>\n
I dressed appropriately (for the sketch you understand, not for anything else!) in skirt, wig, false boobs and make-up, and donned my albatross-laden tray (albatross beautifully created by Mrs. H.). I launched into the sketch, got the appropriate laughs (I think!), and spat out that F-bomb like it was a word of mass destruction.<\/p>\n
In the pub afterwards, my gumby hatchling informed me that that was the first time she can remember having heard me use the F-word. My killer bunny hatchling, being male and a couple of years older, declared that he thought he\u2019d heard me use it once before. They and Mrs. H. all declared their sense of shock and surprise that they\u2019d heard me use that word.<\/p>\n
My childhood friends would have been shocked and surprised too. Not that I\u2019d used the F-word, but that my family were shocked that I\u2019d used it.<\/p>\n
You see, I grew up in east London. Swear words were used by many of the local population as if they were as acceptable then as they had been in the early middle ages. Except for Dad\u2019s occasional use of \u201cbloody\u201d, my parents didn\u2019t swear. But in order to survive and \u201cblend in\u201d at school, I had to lace my conversations with \u201cthose words\u201d. If I hadn\u2019t, I would\u2019ve endured more beatings-up than I did.<\/p>\n
In fact, I embraced the F-culture so wholeheartedly that my friends and I could be heard singing rugby songs around our campfires at Scout<\/em> camps. Baden-Powell was probably gyrating in his grave!<\/p>\n I don\u2019t remember when I cleaned up my act; probably when I entered the workforce. I do remember that parenthood turned me into a puritan; I even invented an expletive for my kids to use, although the details of how to use \u201cschnozbauhrn\u201d are now buried in my sub-conscious.<\/p>\n And I\u2019m fairly sure that everyone in Canada that knows me regards me as one who can usually express himself adequately without recourse to earthy vernacular.<\/p>\n I clearly remember my mum berating me for saying \u201ccrap\u201d at the age of 13 or so; I had no knowledge of the word beyond the fact that my scoutmaster used it.<\/p>\n Thank goodness Mum didn\u2019t come to scout camps with me!<\/p>\n Likewise, our female hatchling learned the \u201cbrown word\u201d at a very<\/em> tender age. The story about her saying \u201coh s**t!\u201d in the back of the car using the exact intonation that Mrs. H. has been known to use on (frequent) occasion is part of family folklore.<\/p>\n And following the import to our home of the F-bomb via the mouth of our male Hatchling when he was five or so (he\u2019d learned it playing out in the street with a policeman\u2019s son) I sat down and (stupidly, according to Mrs. H.) told him all the swear words I could think of so that he knew which words to avoid in the future. I still regard this as a valid piece of parenting; how many adults have been prosecuted for breaking a law they didn\u2019t even know existed?<\/p>\n Okay; so male hatchling may have shared his newly-acquired vocabulary with his kindergarten buddies. We don\u2019t know; but if he did, then fortunately we never heard about it.<\/p>\n A careful search of the wonderweb will inform you that most, if not all, current swear words used to be in everyday speech. The real swears back in the day were those connected with some aspect or other of the Christian faith. Even today, many Americans cannot bring themselves to write, let alone say, words or phrases such as \u201cGod damn\u201d; they apologetically write it as \u201cGD\u201d, as if their omniscient god wouldn\u2019t know the difference between the abbreviation and the full two words!<\/p>\n The \u201cbrown word\u201d can be found in Chaucer\u2019s Canterbury Tales<\/em> as well as Samuel Pepys\u2019 diary, to name but two famous examples. Ditto \u201cpiss\u201d.<\/p>\n That dreadful C-word was used (in disguised fashion) in Hamlet<\/em> by Shakespeare, when he refers to \u201ccountry matters\u201d. The late, great Kenny Everett (a British DJ) used the same gag in one of his Captain Kremmen sketches. It went along the lines of one person saying \u201cI\u2019ll take you to my club. I\u2019m a country member.\u201d and another person replying, \u201cYes, I remember.\u201d<\/p>\n And the F-word? Numerous legends exist on its origin (including at least two ridiculous acronym-related explanations), and there are several scholarly articles on the interweb about it. There\u2019s even a book devoted to its etymology (The F-word<\/em> by Jesse Sheidlower available at Amazon<\/a>).<\/p>\n But the curious thing is that most of these swear words only became so in the Victorian era. It was at that time that anything sexual or excretory became taboo, and since then people have judged other people by their use (or not) of such words, and parents have taken their kids to task over such utterances.<\/p>\n All manner or euphemisms have cropped up for these words, in exactly the same way that euphemisms for religious oaths came about; cripes, golly, jeepers, oh my gosh, heck, gadzooks and darn, are only seven examples of many such euphemisms.<\/p>\n Feck, frick, frak, ferk\u2014all euphemisms for you-know-what. If you use these words, you\u2019re using the F-bomb by proxy. But did you know about \u201cswive\u201d and \u201coccupy\u201d?<\/p>\n Words become swears only because of changing social attitudes\u2014political correctness at work. And the sapiens species, being what it is, will no doubt always declare some words taboo. In my lifetime, the \u201cn\u201d word has made that transition. Who knows how attitudes will change in the future? Will our current swears become acceptable again, while words like \u201cempire\u201d, \u201cmoist\u201d or \u201ccapitalist\u201d become our new taboos?<\/p>\n Who the schnozbauhrn knows? And frankly my dear, who gives<\/em> a schnozbauhrn ?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How much of a potty mouth are you? Parents: have your offspring ever heard you swear, or worse, have they learned to swear from you? Why is there even such a concept as swear words? (Don\u2019t expect an answer to that here!) Mother Do You Think He’ll Drop the F-Bomb? This past weekend (March 25th), I was involved in a… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[488],"tags":[320,321,207,319,667],"class_list":["post-590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bbs","tag-culture","tag-holy-grail","tag-parenting","tag-swears","tag-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1561,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590\/revisions\/1561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}I Swear I Didn’t Know It Was a Swear<\/h1>\n
It Didn’t Used to Be a Swear<\/h1>\n
Will There Ever Be a World With No Swears?<\/h1>\n