On Linguistic Nihilism and Fuddruckers

My mom was worried about me signing up for theater class in high school. Something about her own experience had left her with an image of theater kids as pot-smoking, sexually active ne'er-do-wells with face piercings. She tried to convince me to try something else—anything else—but there was something about her concern that only made me want to take theater all the more. So on the first day of high school, I strolled across campus to the performing arts center with all the confidence of a teenager in open rebellion.We started class by standing on the stage, watching two students mirroring each other's facial expressions and hand movements. Looking around, I felt a smug, teenage satisfaction at finding that my mom had, in fact, been wrong. The theater kids were just like anyone else on campus—pimply and awkward, still growing into their bodies and learning to shave. There was nary a face piercing in sight. As the year went on, the most “action” I got in that class was a stage kiss that my partner and I practiced thoroughly so as to avoid our mouths actually touching. And if anyone was doing drugs, I was never cool enough to be offered any.It wasn't long before I considered myself one of them. We were theater kids. We laughed too loud at Mel Brooks movies, and we could sing the entire “Lumberjack Song” from Monty Python. We wore the occasional wool cape to school, sweating in the Southern California sun as we walked between classes. There was a kind of unabashed freedom among us, a reckless abandon of social mores. We were cultural scientists, willing to try and not afraid of failure, throwing handfuls of spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck.I saw myself as a theater kid.Which is probably why I was so shocked when one of my theater friends sat down next to me in class and said, “I would pay money to hear you swear. That would be hilarious.”I felt the blood rush to my face. “Why would that be so funny?” I asked, even as I already knew the answer.My friend laughed. “You know, just to hear a good little Mormon girl swearing.”All of my theater friends swore like they were auditioning for a Martin Scorsese film. They were artists, colorful shrapnel flying around the room as curse words danced through their dialogue. And they weren't the only ones. You couldn't walk from one class to another without hearing the ratta-tat-tat of swear words punctuating the air like a jackhammer in a construction zone.I didn't swear, though. I never made a big deal about it. I certainly never asked anyone else to stop swearing around me. But I guess people had noticed. My friends had noticed. And it stung to be singled out, to be told I was different from the people who had welcomed me so completely into their “Whoosh Zap Boing” circle.I sometimes wonder what I would have said if my friend had instead asked me “Why don't you ever swear?” I don't think I could have untangled the reasons at that age, the knot of religious training and parental expectation, the weight of being the oldest daughter, an example to my younger siblings. Whatever the particulars, the thought of saying swear words elicited in me a deep anxiety. At the same time, though, I was 15 years old, and I felt desperate to establish myself as an entity outside of my parents’ control. I felt the urge to push back against their authority. Sitting there in the plush theater seats of the school's performing arts center, I was acutely aware of that conflict rising through my core. And as I felt the tug of war between social conformity and defiant individuality, I found myself wondering which side would win. Wondering which side I wanted to win. There was a time when my parents watched The Simpsons. I know this, because I once found a VHS tape with a recording of the episode where Homer buys a snow plow. But by the time I was old enough to pay attention to what my parents were watching, The Simpsons was verboten. When I asked my mom why, she said it was because the show used bad words. Then my little brother whispered, “You mean like B-U-T-T?”My mom took a “fence around the law” approach to swearing. She built boundaries as a way of keeping her children from so much as placing one toe out of line. We weren't allowed to use words like “butt,” and “stupid,” and, of course, any music or television show that featured those words was banned. When I was eight, my mom declared that we would no longer be allowed to use the phrase “Oh my gosh,” because it was too close to the real thing.As she became a parent of teenagers, my mom's list of prohibited words grew to include “crap” and “pissed.” One time I told her my friends were all meeting at a restaurant called “Fuddruckers,” and she said, “We don't use that kind of language in our house.”We all pushed at the boundaries, of course. Although I didn't use commonly accepted curse words, I dabbled in the shallow end at school, where my mom couldn't hear. The word “freaking,” while banned at my house, was secretly one of my favorites. And at home, my siblings and I looked for ways to express our anger or frustration or disdain without incurring punishment. It became an exercise in creativity. I'll never forget the day my four-year-old brother called me an imbecile. I was so proud.But even my mom's protective fences couldn't stop us from learning the words from which she so desperately wanted to protect us. Between PG-13 movies, cable TV, and public school, all six of us, my five younger siblings and I, managed to pick up a hearty vocabulary of swear words on our own. The only problem was that, without consistent exposure to such words, we didn't always know whether they would be a fun, colorful new addition to the “approved” list, or one of those dark, never-to-be-spoken words. Sometimes the only way to find out was by application.Like the time my four-year-old sister sat down at the dinner table, rested her cheek against her fist like a bored little cherub, and casually said, “Oh, damn it.” Or the time my 11-year-old brother, listening in on an older sibling's Great Gatsby homework, called Tom Buchanan “that dirty bastard!” Usually, when situations like this would occur, an awkward silence followed by a measured “What did you just say?” from Mom or Dad was enough to clue you in. In my brother's case, though, he leaned back in his chair, looked my mom in the eyes, and doubled down. “I said he's a dirty bastard.” He got sent to his room for that one. After that drama class, I began to notice that many of my friends were censoring themselves around me. Whenever I was in earshot, they replaced their usual obscenities with pseudo swear words, like “crap” or “dang.” If somebody accidently let a real one rip, they'd apologize. When one of my best friends forgot an assignment at home, she felt the need to pre-apologize for swearing in front of me. “Sorry,” she said, then punched out a pretty big one. I was less shocked by the swear word than I was by the apology.At church that week, I sat in Sunday School with my bible open on my lap. We took turns reading from the book, one verse per person. I followed along until finally it was my turn to read. I took a deep breath and used my practiced stage voice. “And Samson said, With the jawbone of an . . . ”I paused. It was a microscopic pause, almost imperceptible to the outside world. But in that millisecond, I could feel the machinations of my brain as I decided what I was going to do. There on the page, right in front of me, was a swear word. A real swear word, worse than “butt” or “stupid.” If I read it, I'd be swearing in church. If I didn't . . . what then?I had been raised with the basic religious belief that language held weight. I mean, if words didn't carry some mysterious power to profane, why would there be a whole commandment about taking the Lord's name in vain? (Listed even before thou shalt not murder.) On the other hand, though, I wasn't really sure what road my mom—or society, for that matter—had taken to get all the way from commandment number three to “you're not allowed to say butt.” And as those cogs turned in my mind, a tiny shoulder Nietzsche began to whisper in my ear: “What are words, anyway? These letters are just pulled from the sky and smashed together to make a sound. How can a word be good or bad?” He had a point.So I said it.“. . . ass . . . ”Nice and loud.The boy who spent class balanced on the back legs of his metal folding chair leaned forward and snickered into his hands.I thought about being embarrassed, but my shoulder Nietzsche whispered, “Don't worry about him. He doesn't even realize that the chair he's sitting in only exists as a concept in his mind. Ass.”And just like that, I'd started down the path of linguistic nihilism. Up until this point, my main cache of “swear words” had been inherited from my granddad. I'm not exactly sure why. We didn't live close—about 1500 miles away—and we only visited once a year. It shouldn't have been enough exposure to subconsciously absorb his speech patterns. But something about that 67-year-old man from the Ozarks took root in my brain. When I stubbed my toe, I'd spit out a good old-fashioned “dag nabbit!” A forgotten homework assignment might elicit a loud “shoot!” And nothing felt quite as good as hollering “dog gummit!” in a moment of frustration.I'd always assumed, being the living heir to my granddad's curse words, that my mom had been raised the same way I had. Fences erected to protect the children from falling into a pit of blasphemy. Which is why I was shocked when I learned that Granddad's repository of language ran deeper than I thought.It was the summer before I started high school—long before that fateful day in drama class—and we were visiting my extended family in Kansas City. My granddad had a brand new computer in his home office, which he used mostly for doing family history work and storing digital versions of family pictures. But this was a time when kids had just started to know more about home computers than adults, so when the whole family was gathered together at my grandparent's house, the teenaged cousins took over that computer. We'd log in to the painfully slow dial-up Internet and show each other funny videos that took longer to load than we spent watching them. It always made Granddad a little anxious to see a large group of kids huddled together around his expensive home computer, and every once in a while he'd poke his head in and warn us, “Don't you be changing anything on my computer!” While I can't speak to the innocence of my many cousins, I know that I certainly never changed anything on Granddad's computer. Still, every time Granddad sat down in the office, without fail we'd hear the yell: “Someone's been changing things on my computer!” And he'd spring up from his desk and take a lap through the house, pointing his finger at all of his grandkids. “Did you change my computer? I can't find any of my files!” No one ever fessed up. One day Granddad decided that he'd had enough. Obviously his warnings had not been harsh enough. He needed to dress his thoughts in words that truly expressed his intent—perhaps some kind of ripped-denim vest, like those worn by a bounty hunter or loose-cannon cop on TV.The next time we gathered around Granddad's computer we noticed that he had renamed the files on his desktop from “My Pictures” and “My Documents,” to “My Damn Pictures” and “My Damn Documents (do not touch).”I felt the heat in my cheeks, shocked by my granddad's misbehavior. Self-conscious about the fact that I wasn't supposed to be seeing those words. I thought about telling my mom, but though I was more than willing to throw my siblings under the bus, I didn't want to snitch on my granddad. So I pretended not to notice anything different and watched my mouse scurry over to the AOL logo.But that moment sat with me, and as I lay in bed months later, I could feel his words floating among so many others in an untapped reservoir, bumping against an ancient, protective dam (the kind you're allowed to say). And my little shoulder Nietzsche was giggling as he ran explosive wire across the whole thing. I started with the bible swears. The ones that caused snickers in Sunday School but didn't even justify a sideways glance from any of the high school teachers. They were closer to the words I'd been using all along anyway, so they felt more accessible.From there, it was easy to justify the biological swear words. After all, if I said the word “bitch,” maybe I was just talking about a female dog. And “bastard” wasn't necessarily a curse word. It could be an archaic (and slightly rude) reference to the state of a person's family situation.That first week, I was a new person. My friends cheered every time I tried out a new word, like parents watching their infant take a first step. Then they encouraged me to walk a little farther, a little faster. To step a little deeper into the water.I tried. Honestly, I did. I quoted Monty Python and the Holy Grail without self-censoring. I slipped in some big ones at my friends’ promptings. I chose a monologue for my midterm that featured performances by a number of top-tier swear words. But I never really became comfortable saying them. They had a different texture than other words, sort of gritty and sticky on my tongue, like a popsicle that had melted and refrozen. Each time I said one, I felt a visceral reaction, like an out-of-body experience, almost. Watching myself say the words. Even when I knew they were coming, even when I planned and prepared to swear, every word felt like a surprise coming out of my mouth. And even after a week of practice, the words never came naturally to me. I'd slip back into my old ways, pinching my finger in a door and hollering “Shoot!” at the top of my lungs. The drama kids would look at me, disappointment framing their faces, and I'd quickly rummage for an appropriate replacement. It was a lot of work.As I began my second week of swearing at school (absolutely not at home, though), I noticed that some of the novelty had worn off. My drama friends weren't as excited anymore when I remembered to swear in front of them. It was just another word in just another sentence on just another school day.Over the next week I quietly faded curse words out of my vocabulary. I felt a little ashamed about not being able to live up to my friends’ expectations, about abandoning the rebellion I had started so openly. So I'm not great at swearing, I thought, trying to defend the decision to both myself and my disappointed shoulder Nietzsche. I don't have to be perfect at everything. But the dissonance remained: I didn't like swearing, and I also didn't like the implications of being a who didn't swear, the that I really was just good little Mormon That I couldn't even through in a rebellion made up of words. In that the only I could find was the that if anyone ever asked me in the why I didn't swear, I always could I tried it. my As the years went I thought less and less about my decision to up swear words. had something other people did that I or on the I even managed to a man been raised in a with linguistic his to a as he a of are the only words they he'd course, not to say that we our own language in the same way our parents had. We were There were no around to us for saying or or Even after we had our first we didn't think about using the words we had with our one day that up from his with his and It was not my moment as a Nietzsche didn't a against the on a a of mom and religious started protective I made a list of words my and I would no longer say in front of our was on And for It felt to back into those boundaries my own mom had and I found myself words that I knew were not actually swear words, like “butt” and My a when I with the list, but we and decided to what I wanted took a for that parental to off. With a little and with my linguistic shoulder Nietzsche the of from his I started to with the It was a a of and that I'd my and all it out for control. my experience with swearing, I had never actually to a to my about I'd to the dissonance that I felt as just one of those of being a I that my was the of of cultural a sometimes that I asked for but that was a of my But did I want to that on to my own words are just words, after And if really just words, why it if we say If words only have as we why anyone what of out of my If he was just going to all anyway, why make the to from such that why with any of and some boundaries are for to those shalt from the for what about all the that we just The things I was my own You have to when you out of was the leaned in a little watching me through his tiny wire then I remembered into that first day of drama class in high school. I on that stage and felt like both me. But for all the things I about being a theater I had to that the most of my was that it was in a my main was good I because I was for them. When I got though, the and boundaries that my parents for me became of my of my that I could face and with with drama through those and in the with the and decided that I to the the came from my parents or church or didn't really was was that they so that when my teenage to the of I had a in which to And in the more of even though I wasn't able to truly my own and with or to with my I decided shoulder Nietzsche something about being an that my needed Even ones. ones. while a on and parental I that my would need something to push to to that he was That he was And I would the social of language than for a more to is this year. He that we don't use swear words. But he's also to to look for a way to his of from his He to in the face of our to feel like he's down fences and his on that we have never and can never I know what kind of language he when he I find already in the of down the that I erected for long the he's watching a of language with the he already together into one And maybe he's even a that have to at school, though, because we don't use that kind of language in our