Hey… As of tomorrow, I’ll have been doing this for a year. That’s not bad… And I’ve managed to keep the language fairly clean too.
It’s a conscious decision… I’ve seen the bizarre things that people have put into Google that got them to this site. I don’t want some eight year old kid researching a paper on, say, grasshoppers, to stumble into a profane diatribe about how “The Legend Continues” sucks compared to the old Kung Fu TV series…
OK, I’m not likely to write anything about the series. I don’t watch it, and I’m certainly not going to write a review of it. But if I did, I’d be careful to avoid swearing.
Not that it’s much of a strain for me. I generally don’t swear much. It’s just a habit that I never got into… Unless I’m with certain people. Two of my groomsdudes are people I’ve known since I was twelve, and when I’m around them I tend to have a much looser rein on my vocabulary. Casual profanity requires a certain comfort level.
I had a discussion about this Therck’s husband Scott while we were doing baby wrangling last Sunday. I was wondering in what ways having a baby around the house had changed his life, and we somehow got on the subject of swearing. Generally, unless you want to re-enact a scene from “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” you tend to watch your mouth a bit around kids. In his case, not much watching needed to be done… His family moved a lot while he was growing up, so he never had a crowd with whom he could curse.
Personally, I think that if you swear too much it loses impact. A single well placed epithet can be the tactical nuclear device of conversation. Too many of them is an assault of rubber-band propelled paperclips. Going back to Jay and Silent Bob, nobody is surprised if Jay launches into a five minute stream of curse words. On the other hand, if you were watching a biography of Mother Theresa and she did the same thing, I’m sure you’d sit up and pay attention. It’d be like Switzerland declaring that the whole neutrality thing was just a ruse and unleashing bloody war upon the European continent.