My First Cuss Words

On my favorite podcast, Galactica Watercooler, one of the guys recalled how when he was a kid, he read a book that contained profanity and sex scenes. His parents asked him a couple times about the book he was reading, and when his father finally read it, he agreed not to mention to the mother that the book was somewhat R-rated. After that, the kid was allowed to swear in certain instances--if he hurt himself and so forth. It was like an unspoken agreement between him and his father.

It got me to thinking about my first cuss words. I remember being about five or six years old and uttering "fuck" to my sister, who told me that I had said a very bad word. I asked one of my parents, and they said indeed it was bad.

Then, I remember watching some bizarre sketch comedy with my dad when I was about nine (possibly on HBO in the early 1980s). In one skit about the life of Howard Hughes, the narrator said that he most enjoyed watching airplanes fuck. I asked my dad what fuck meant. I think that I thought I knew what it meant, but what I thought I knew made absolutely no sense in this context. I like to picture my father thinking about how to explain to me the meaning of fuck and how it fit into the context of this comedy.

Profanity became an integral part of my father's vocabulary by that time, but I studiously avoided using swear words. In fact, I remained almost pure in my speech long after my friends starting cussing up a blue streak. I remember one day in junior high, me, David, and our friend Eric were doing the usual...creating new ways to occupy ourselves for the hours on end we were warehoused in the cafeteria with nothing to do. We were inventing a game or something. Our conversation was something like this:

Me: Let's draw the building.
Eric: Better yet, let's draw the whole fucking city.
Me: Even better, let's draw the whole fucking...

I stopped, stunned that I had even let profanity slip from my mouth. My face turned red as they both laughed at me, knowing that I never sweared.

I think after that, the dam kind of broke, and I started to slowly incorporate profanity into my everyday language. I believe I started with "Jesus." My cousin Mike was very fond of exclaiming "Jesus!" if he hurt himself or something surprising happened, and I think that's why I started with that one. Plus, it was kind of in a gray area between mild oaths and outright profanity.

On top of that, I think it was around that time that Indiana Jones was shouting "Jesus!" as Marian shoved her torch into his bullwhip, thinking it was a snake. I think I probably even tried to capture his inflection: Jeee'-zuss. In fact, I probably still said it that way when I had the very painful electricity-in-the-foot-and-leg-muscles test last year, which I wrote about in this blog.

In fact, I have a theory that we both use the word Jesus exactly as often as we did when I was twelve.