Profanity

I wore myself out swimming this morning. It had been far too long since I had been in the pool. I cut my workout short because I didn’t want to overdue it, and there’s nothing interesting about my swim to write about. I looked at a black line on the bottom of the pool, I rinsed, I repeated.


Instead I’m going to write about stuff that I read in the New York Times today. An interesting note about Justice John Paul Stevens’s retirement is that he is/was the only Protestant justice on the bench. Everyone else is a Catholic or a Jew. I have no idea what that means – if anything – but I find it an interesting bit of trivia.

I read five opinions of academics on why educated people use bad words. I thought they were all pretty close to the mark. The opinions ranged from sometimes people need a little extra umph in expressing an emotion to profanity as a rebellious social bonding mechanism. The same word is used by two different vice presidents in both examples. Dick Cheney used the F-word to let a congressman know how angry he was, while Joe Biden used the F-word to share a victory moment with the president. Profanity is used more in places that have thrown off the yoke of imperial colonialism. Americans and Australians curse more than the English do. Mexicans and Cubans curse more than Spaniards. I love bad words. There’s a poetry to profanity. That’s why people have a much harder time cursing in a foreign language. That’s why everyone reverts back to their mother tongue when they need to let someone know what’s what. The Govenator has been here for forty years and speaks great, if heavily accented, English, but he has maybe three phrases he uses in his movies. I would be surprised if he didn’t slip back into some German when he talks to Maria about the California legislature. I’ve been trying to learn how to curse in Spanish for years. I’ve got a book specifically for it, but I have no idea how it flows.

Actually, the book is about how the same words mean different things in different parts of Latin America and how not to get embarrassed trying to get a taxi to the airport. They need to come out with a dirty Rosetta Stone. I’d buy them.