So I guess I've been talking a lot lately about Betsy and speech. Ok, I talk a lot about Betsy most times. Betsy, Betsy Betsy. Apart from an inching along cross stitch project, a quilt, and a career I mostly consider off-limits in this venue what ELSE am I doing with my life, eh? She's the most worthy thing in my life. And that's not sour grapes, my friends, that's joy.
Anyhow, I had a post brewing about potty mouth. Mine. And Betsy learning to talk. What's the magic of the potty mouth? Why does it feel so GOOD to call someone who has really pissed you off a cum guzzling road whore when I BLUSH to write such a thing in print? Why do we say something is FUCKING AWESOME or FUCKING TERRIBLE or well, just FUCK IT!
Although I can't come up with the study I got it from, interviews with children suggest that they perceive obscenity as attaching to important speech. Want what you say to be heard? Tack on the word fuck. Want it to be taken seriously? Perhaps an interjection of SHIT is acceptable every so often. This is an important fucking speech so you should listen the fuck up. I had your attention there, right? The power for the adult is that obscenity associates the speech with our most powerful urges and images - the sexual. This is commanding of our attention, so we sex it up. Needless to say, kids don't understand the sexual. But they find our reaction to it fascinating.
Back to Betsy learning to talk. Well, I never shocked myself with the things I said before. I'm sure I offended others, but I didn't really CARE. There was no venue in my life where sexual speech could actually enter and not be understood as the power-speech intended. Whether you liked it or not, YOU FUCKING JERK was not about to make the person called such a thing imagine they were actually copulating or that I thought of copulating with them.
Now enter my daughter. She's got no subtext for what she says. She hasn't come up with any of the big three (shit, damn or fuck) yet. And I would whole heartedly prefer she didn't until she had some capacity to understand how that speech registers with others. I care for her innocence and teaching her to parrot adult sayings seems like the worst obscenity at all.
My potty mouth is on its way to being cleaned up. God damn it.
Posted by karen at June 13, 2004 07:15 PM