Ode To OSP

I love swear words. I love the way the word fuck rolls off my tongue. I think it must equate to the way expensive ice cream tastes really smooth and creamy; the way clean sheets feel super soft and luxurious when you first lay between them; or perhaps, the inhalation of a much needed cigarette, for those of you who still bravely partake of the socially unpopular practice. Swearing feels like my guilty pleasure. My adult pleasure: I don’t allow my children the same verbal freedoms. For those of you already yelling about hypocrisy, I also don’t allow them to drink, vote, or drive a car. There are some privileges that come with age. 

 

It always amazes me how upset people get at the occasional expletive. I follow a parenting site on Facebook (don’t look so surprised, I did write a parenting book) and it seems the use of profanity has gotten people downright pissed off. So angry as a matter of fact, one jackass (I couldn’t help myself) even declared the foul mouth offender unworthy of being a mother. Seriously! As if the criteria for being a ‘fit’ mother relies solely on the words one uses to articulate feelings, thoughts, opinions, or ideas. 

I believe that it isn’t the use of certain words that are destructive or offensive. It is the way in which those words are used, i.e., you are fucking awesome vs. you are simply worthless. Wikipedia Encyclopedia seems to agree with me. It defines an expletive as, “a word that performs a syntactic role but contributes nothing to the meaning.” Bing Dictionary throws another vote my way, stating, “an expletive is a word with no meaning: a word that carries no meaning but has a grammatical function in a sentence.”

Many parents demean and damage their children every day without ever using a single cuss word: Why are you so stupid? You are so lazy. You are fat. You are useless. These are the words that should be curse words, completely off limits in the aforementioned ‘fit’ mother criteria. These are the words that should offend us because they have meaning. They have the power to devastate your child’s self-worth, to destroy their future. As a parent, that is what should be considered fucking unforgivable. 

Oh shit, I used that word again… Mmm, it feels so good sometimes.