Bleep

          I taught a private knitting lesson yesterday.  When things got a little challenging, my student said, "I hope I don't start to swear."
         Ah, a kindred soul, I thought.  "Go right ahead," I encouraged.
          I learned the joys of cursing in 1968 when I was fifteen years old.  The person responsible for that was the girl who sat in front of me in study hall.  She accomplished her task innocently enough – she loaned me a tattered copy of a book she had found in her mother’s collection.  By today’s standards, Betty MacDonald’s tale, The Egg and I, was a chaste account of a city girl transplanted to the country.  She chronicled her adjustment to life as the wife of an egg farmer.  For the heroine, learning to farm also meant learning to swear.  Uttering “hell” and “damn” became as natural as breathing.  To round out my education, my study hall friend next loaned me Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House written by Eric Hodgins.  Mr. Blandings found that building a home in the country was impossibly frustrating unless one blew off a little steam by calling a few things "Christ-bitten."

     Reading curse words was one thing.  Saying them out loud was another.  I did not begin swearing in earnest until I became a college student.  The Rutgers Daily Targum, our newspaper, was peppered with obscenities.  We were required to read Chaucer, Shakespeare and Ben Johnson, all of whom used swearing and sexual references in their works.  At this point I found that I could let a few choice words slip out in front of my mother.  Soon we were both swearing like sorority sisters. 

     The outside world was not as hip as mom and I, but it didn’t take long to catch up.  Characters on the regular television channels began swearing like Mr. Blandings.  Characters on the cable channels used George Carlin’s list of seven dirty words and even added a few new ones. 

     I found a series of swearing dictionaries in the bookstore and purchased English/Spanish and English/French versions.  Why was I collecting profanities? 

     Toward the end of his life, my father suffered a stroke.   He lost his ability to speak, that is, until he got upset.  Then he could unleash a stream of expletives.  What was going on here?  Could dirty words be so deeply ingrained in our brains that they remained after other speech was lost?

     I learned that human brains do not store swearing in the same area as regular speech. Language, a higher function, resides in the cortex or outer layer of the brain.  Swearing is connected to the limbic system and basal ganglia deeper (and safer) within the brain.  The limbic system houses memory and emotions.  The basal ganglia play a role in impulse control.  Curse words are not just words, but words bonded to emotions and self control. 

     People swear to relieve stress.   Perhaps this venting prevents physical violence. Even chimpanzees have a grunting, spitting, and gesturing ceremony that looks like a swearing match. 

     Swearing is tied to culture.  It seems the more private the matter or the more revered the subject, the more ways people will find to disparage it.  Body functions, religion, and your mother are all fair game.

     When I read those funny books in high school, I began to feel grown up.  The dirty words made the books adult literature.  Swearing and laughter go together for me, but I’m not one to curse when I get angry.  I would rather use big vocabulary words then, so you know how smart I am.

     Sometimes, for a little fun, I get out those dictionaries and practice cussing in other languages, and I laugh my a - - off!