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Omit a cussword, and save a lifestyle
By Jillian Lazzaro
Thu Mar 27, 2008, 12:09 PM EDT
I guess sometimes I forget that we don't live in Pleasantville. I spent a couple years living in Boston, where domestic brawls in the apartment above mine, or the clash of road-rage on the street outside my window, could interrupt my blissful sleep any night.
Here in North Attleborough, taking the dog for a walk on a sunny day, well, sometimes the moment is so peaceful that I almost expect the birds and chipmunks to start singing Disney tunes.
But then, suddenly, all that can be destroyed when I nearly trip over the three-foot curse words scratched into the mulch. And I'm not talking about just curse words--I'm talking about the really bad ones. The ones that still haven't made it onto late-night radio; the ones you can only hear on HBO; the ones that Meredith Viera apologizes for on The Today Show.
I'm not a saint. I like HBO, and in the morning I always catch the Today Show. I might have even been caught saying these words, but only when my enraged temperament warranted it; only when kids were in bed, behind thick walls, in another state.
In any normal conversation, these words might have not bothered me; but these very large, very neatly written, correctly-spelled curse words were scrawled into the mulch on an elementary school playground. I couldn't help thinking of itty-bitty kindergarteners stopping dead in their tracks when they hit the playground for recess and spotted these strange words.
So, like any person might, I feverishly scraped the words out, while the dog and my boyfriend looked on, wondering if I was having an epileptic fit.
But it got me thinking: why do we put such emphasis on bad words?
We try to teach kids that words have no emotional value, but really, with our attention to and avoidance of certain words we inadvertently show that words can manipulate our lives. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me…except for the b-word, and maybe even the s-word, oh, and especially, the f-word.
I remember the first time I said a swear word when I was eleven. I'd heard it while eavesdropping on my older brothers with their friends, and just by the way they'd said it, I knew it was a sound that held weight in a conversation.
Maybe it was to impress my parents with my "adult vocabulary," but for whatever reason, I said it. The look that crossed their faces was all the evidence I needed to know that just by saying that word, I had taken advantage of some kind of unspoken power.
While I thought it was the power of knowledge, the advent of adulthood, I soon learned, through my weeks deprived from television and sweets, how very powerful that word was. I'm pretty sure my Barbies were also thrown into the bargain, and that might have been the tipping point.
Maybe, subconsciously, I was aware of my parents' reaction when I covered up those very bad words on the playground the other day. Perhaps, even more than the kids, I was thinking of the parents they'd go home to. Those elementary students could have just been learning to read, and after memorizing those letters, they'd go home to sound out those strange words for their moms and dads. And while the kids might have been blissfully ignorant of what they were saying, it's the parents that would have been bothered by the swear words. It's me, stopping dead in my nearly blissful walk, to frantically erase those words, that was probably more bothered than any wild child on recess would be.
Email Lazzaro at jlazzaro@nafreepress.com
