By Dylan Lightfoot
My granny taught me to cuss. She deserves all the credit. Somewhere in the hollers of Harlan County — probably from her moonshiner daddy — she learned to swear like a longshoreman in her inimitable hillbilly twang, then dutifully passed it on to her children and grandchildren.
Or maybe she didn’t learn it. Maybe virtuoso potty mouths, like all wordsmiths, are born rather than trained. Anybody can spew a stream of four-letter words, but only a talented few have the innate panache, the sense of timing and delivery that marks the true prodigy of profanity. When Granny screamed,“You damned kids get the hell away from there! Who in the hell gave you permission to jump on the f—ing bed?” we weren’t just getting bawled out, we were receiving communion from whatever foul-mouthed muse possessed her when impropriety reared its vile head.
Later, Granny found God — he was apparently kicking around McDowell County, North Carolina, at the time — and swore off the swearing. But her legacy lives on.
I, too, am a consummate blasphemer. Swearing isn’t just a knee-jerk excess of invective for me, it’s a demiurge that demands expression. When novelist Jean Shepard narrates in “A Christmas Story” that his father “worked in profanity the way other artists work in oils or clay,” he has me to a tee. Foul language is my idiom.
Apart from the stock palette of colorful words you can’t say on television — all of which I use liberally — I have a few leitmotifs of my own, including “homemade jackass,” “s—, fire and damnation,” and “dirty bastard.” The latter I find particularly useful when wrestling with home repairs or watching CNN.
Aesthetics aside, the true potty mouth is also a bit of a curmudgeon. He or she is inspired by a deep-seated hatred for minor hassles most have no difficulty accepting. Two weeks ago, my sweetie and I stopped at Krispy Kreme on the way to campus. When I asked for a half-dozen plain cake donuts — the only kind I like — and was politely informed they had been discontinued, did I calmly say, “Aw, really? Well, give me the glazed then, I guess”? Not this cowboy.
“Jesus, f—ing Christ! What is the world coming to?” I griped at the completely innocent girl at the counter, who had exactly nothing to do with corporate donut production strategies. It’s times like these that I realize the unqualified truth about myself: I have a swearing problem. My name is Dylan … and I am profanity dependent.
I am powerless over swearing. I cuss all the time, even in situations where it’s not appropriate. The F-word falls from my lips during staff meetings, bank transactions and visits to the DMV. This illustrates another key trait potty mouths share: we lack social grace. We are the sort who make asses of ourselves telling off-color anecdotes to people who don’t want to hear them.
Once, working as a server in a little Italian joint, I told a table a joke — the butt of which was Jesus himself — generously sprinkled with salty metaphors. Moments later, my manager collared me and asked me why my table had requested a different waiter.
Nor do I have any compunction about sailor-talking around my children. For years, I have explained that these are “grown-up words” they aren’t allowed to say … around grown-ups. This fine piece of parenting has the added benefit of demonstrating a valuable life lesson about the reality of double standards, I tell myself.
Of course, that’s how the whole cycle repeats itself: monkey see, monkey do — or so the developmental psychologists tell us. I’m sure I would be appalled to listen in on any of my 12-year-old’s slumber parties. All I can hope for is that my progeny don’t become coarse “vulgarians,” but gifted trash rhetoricians in the family tradition.
If not, I can still blame my granny.
Dylan Lightfoot is a junior pursuing a double major in Psychology and Political Science, and is Opinion Editor and Web Editor for The Cardinal.
E-mail him at: dlightfoot@louisvillecardinal.com
