My mother will never let me forget a certain story that she perpetually likes to tell around the dinner table.
According to her, I acquired the mouth of a sailor straight out of the womb.
Let me set the stage for you: I am approximately three years old, having a delightful breakfast with my nanny at a quaint little diner in town. After eating my slice of toast with grape jelly, pretending to feed some to my favorite baby doll that I carried around with me everywhere, and scribbling in one of the complementary coloring book pages of Puff the Magic Dragon, we are ready to take off.
It is a normal day as we step outside the diner, the sun beating down on my corduroy jumper as I skip happily down the sidewalk, my blonde pigtails bobbing along behind me while we make our way to the car. An elderly woman stops to ogle at my undeniable adorableness and compliment my nanny on what a “sweet little girl I am,” when I stop dead in my tracks. I had made a terrible mistake.
In the midst of being adored, I smack my hand against my forehead and exasperatingly exclaim the infamous nine words that my mother will never let me live down to this day: “I forgot my f***ing baby doll in the restaurant!”
Needless to say, the old woman and my nanny were both appalled that I had attained such an extensive vocabulary at my young age.
Though this story always raises some laughs from anyone who hears it, it also makes me wonder if curse words are really as powerful as they used to be – I mean hey, if three-year-olds are comfortable enough using them, they can not be all that bad, right?
Think about it in terms of movies. The famous line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” from the 1939 film Gone with the Wind caused a lot of uproar with its release. It strongly conflicted against censors regarding curse word prohibitions from the 1930 Motion Picture Association’s production code and almost was not even put into the movie due to its “inappropriate nature.” Now movies will drop the F-bomb without the blink of an eye.
I know times are changing. Something that was deemed “scandalous” back in the day would probably be brushed off with a no-big-deal mentality today. Which, in a way, is a good thing. After all, curse words are just words, an arrangement of a select few letters strung together, just like any other word in the dictionary. Why should we be so afraid of using them?
But with the loss of shock value in today’s curse words, we also lose the ability to express the intense emotion that we used to be able to convey with these same words in the past. If no words are powerful, than we, by comparison, are not as powerful in what we want to portray either.
Curse words are becoming more commonly accepted. We can see that “everyone’s doing it” so to speak, but what will happen when these words inevitably become obsolete? We have seen it happen in the past – I do not suppose anyone still uses the Shakespearian “zounds” as a curse word? – and the past unquestionably has a history of repeating itself.
More and more people are using curse words in their everyday jargon and children are even learning to curse at a young age. These words are losing less and less of their value each time we use them and eventually we will be forced to throw them out and replace them with new shockingly offensive words, just like we have in the past – the element of surprise is just embedded in our human nature, and we can not live without it.
So who knows, perhaps we may be seeing a new line of deplorable curse words arise among us in the foreseeable future. Or maybe we’ll just have to find new, creative ways of using the ones we already have. Only time will tell. Until then, f*** it.
