I don’t like the words we have for profanity.
Not the profane words themselves—those are fine, I suppose. I mean the words we use for using profanity: “cussing,” “cursing,” “swearing.” None of them seem accurate or efficient in the least.
“Cussing,” for instance, sounds like something invented by eight-year-olds. When I was a kid, groups of boys would get together and decide if we were going to start cussing. This wasn’t a haphazard choice but a formal decision. Once made, we became cussers. We traded cuss words like baseball cards. It didn’t matter that none of us knew what the words meant. Meaning wasn’t the point. Cussing was.
We would even use the word to report on each other.
“Are you friends with David Little?” my mother would ask.
“Not anymore,” I’d say. “He cusses.”
My mother was not a fan of cussing or people who cussed. Some parents washed their children’s mouths out with soap. My mother raised the threat and said she would cut our tongues out. We never doubted she would. She once washed my brother’s mouth out in the toilet for cussing. Today, my brother cusses to a level that would make Quentin Tarantino blush. I’m not sure if that’s revenge or if some residual toilet-bowl cleanser tweaked something in his brain.
Once, shooting basketball with some fifth-grade friends, I started saying “Damn!” every time I missed a shot. I had no idea what the word meant, but it made Judy Rudder laugh, which was good enough for me. It was the same feeling that launched Eddie Murphy’s entire career.
Still, the word “cussing” feels off. And there’s a reason for that, it’s really just a mutation of the word “cursing,” which originally meant “wishing evil on someone.” Historically, curses involved sorcerers, forest witches, and very specific misfortunes from bodily affliction and bad luck to death. Sometimes it even included eating children or evoking angry deities who also occasionally liked a bowl of kid soup.
In that sense, shouting “Goddamn it!” is, indeed, a curse. Possibly the worst curse imaginable. Asking God to damn anything is going straight to the nuclear option. But telling your ex-boyfriend to “Kiss my ass!” hardly feels like invoking dark forces. Depending, of course, on the ass you’re being commanded to kiss. I’ve seen some asses that were a porthole to Hades but let’s stick with more Earthly curses.
Religious people, wary of cursing, invented more righteous curse alternatives like “Gosh darn it!” “Shoot a monkey!” and “Kiss my foot!” Personally, I would feel far more cursed being forced to kiss most feet than most asses, which may explain why “cursing” remains to me an ambiguous category.
The Irish, at least, understand what a curse is supposed to be:
May those who love us, love us;
And for those who don’t love us,
May God turn their hearts;
And if He doesn’t turn their hearts,
May He turn their ankles.
That sounds like an actual spell. And that’s what a curse should be. If we’re going to call it cursing, make it sound like something spoken in a monotonous meter over a cauldron. I recommend shouting something like, “May you kiss my ass the way the devil kisses a French virgin in a secluded Cambodian brothel.” Spells don’t have to make sense. They just have to have commitment.
Even worse than cursing is “swearing.” Swearing is simply taking an oath. How it came to include phrases like “That son of a bitch owes me a gosh darn beer!” is beyond me. Early religious people avoided oaths entirely, so I suppose any words they refused to say because they made them—or God—uncomfortable eventually became known as swearing. Which explains conversations like:
“It’s slicker than owl shit out there!”
“Luther, stop swearing!”
As kids, we also got in trouble for saying “titties,” a word that fits none of these categories. “Titties” isn’t cussing or swearing, and if it’s a curse, well, may I be so hexed. Growing up, my mother had a favorite cousin named Tootie. Little did Tootie know she was only an “it” away from being banished to eternal damnation. Or at least having her mouth washed out in the toilet.
I’d like to propose a more useful word for speaking profanity. Let’s drop the insufficient verbs of “cussing,” “cursing,” and “swearing.” We all know Samuel L. Jackson is world-famous for colorful profanity. Let’s simply name the action after him.
“I grounded Brian for samjacking with the neighborhood kids.”
“Father Andrew, this is the Lord’s house—take your samjacking outside.”
“Oh, Tom, you know how I love it when you samjack during sex.”
Not only do we gain a much more useful word, we also honor one of the greatest samjackers in history.
And that’s a motherfucking triumphant honor.
Pardon my samjack.
[Photo by Barnabas Lartey-Odoi Tetteh on Unsplash]
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