Day 1 of the Dre Beltrami Challenge

Filthy ass words from a royal bitch

Recently read this awesome Stack by Dre Beltrami. I love me a good writing prompt and these were so refreshing and fun I’ve decided I’m going to go for it and try them all. In Dre we trust.

Prompt 1: The Profanity Test (a.k.a. Swear Like You Mean It)

I’m not saying you have to swear. But I am saying if you do swear in real life and suddenly morph into a prim + proper Victorian poet when you write, we have a problem. Try this: Write something (a social post, an email, a Substack Note, whatever’s clever) exactly how you’d say it in a voice memo to your best friend. THEN, go back and check—did you censor yourself? If yes, put the bleeping personality back in.

This isn’t actually too much of an issue for me. I don’t censor myself or my cursing in my writing. Or my thinking. Or my speaking. I read somewhere that highly intelligent people are found to curse more and clickbait, made-up bullshit or no, I choose to believe it. Because it’s more funner, goddammit. I don’t want you to blink back at me while I insult you with my $15 SAT phraseology. I want to aggrieve you now, thanks.

The thing about language and cursing is, you can sub in any word and the intention is still pretty clear. Just because you say, “fudge” instead of “fuck” doesn’t mean you don’t mean fuck any less. I’m glad you do it for the children. Yes, spare the children and elders blah blah. But kids aren’t going to be offended by shit they don’t even know the meaning of and elders are more likely to be entertained by your shitty mouth than offended - I mean, YMMV with the elders. I can almost hear the ghost of my grandfather, a real conservative, proper misogynist from what I’m told, give me shit in Korean for, “not speaking like a lady.” But also, he died before I was even born so actually, I don’t hear shit. So who are you fudging for? Kids react because you react. They overhear someone speaking normally and repeat what they say, “shit.” Everyone gasps and wags their fingers and gives them hand earmuffs (which do nothing by the way! they can still hear, dumbass, your hands are not noise-canceling tech) and scolds the speaker like they’re casually discussing rape. I thought this was one of those, “This goes without saying,” hypotheticals but discussing rape is not okay in front of a kid. Saying traffic in the carpool lane is a shit show, is. Your big production is why they store it away and whisper it to their friends and say it again later in front of even bigger crowds.

And where do you draw the line? People will snap at hearing kids say Hell or Shoot or Suck. Why? Goddamn is another. Even God by his good ole’ holy self. Odds are you are snippy about their overall talk-backedness than the words they happen to choose to express it. That’s a you problem, parent, not a linguistic issue. And by shutting them down with word choice, you’re only creating resentment in what will ultimately become the age-old battle of, “You never listen to me!” “You don’t care what I think!” “You just want to tell me what to do and you’re ruining my life and I hate you!” ~Tale as old as tiiiiime~

It’s like when some old, white guy calls me, “sweetheart” and then is surprised when I’m enraged. He thinks he’s being nice. Sweetheart is a curse word to me. When I hear that, I want to spit in his goddamn eye. I want to break my foot off in his saggy asshole.

Language also evolves, pesky thing. Words that started off having one meaning traditionally will take on others based on some version of a content creator making a zippy contribution to the zeitgeist. Tons of words now have half a dozen meanings, some in direct contradiction to each other based on context, and the Merriam-Webster signs off on them! Gay. Asshole. Pussy. Shit. Go look them up and see for yourself.

Further, if you tell someone not to use certain words now because they’re “too young,” what the fuck does that even mean? No parent ever has a good reason or explanation for this because there isn’t one. Turning 12 or 16 or 18 isn’t some magical release or rite of passage that now allows for use of curse words (and only these ones, not those ones). It goes back to basically telling a kid to shut up, stop getting angry, get over it, stop embarrassing you, and/or that their feelings are too much and that you don’t want to deal with them. And that’s never backfired smh.

Let’s say it’s a racist word like Nigga. Explain. Explain why it’s fucked up for them to call someone that. Explain that’s it’s rooted in hatred and oppression and violence and that racism is shitty. That’s too much for a kid (and some elderly people) to understand? Okay. Explain that it’s a bad word to call someone because it means you hate them for being black. If your kid nods along, newsflash: you have got some bigger fuckin problems on your hands than your kid swearing.

Someone famously said that words have power. And they sure do. All of them. The power they have is awarded by we who define and use them (re: big production) so let’s fuckin use them but use them right: as tools of communication and expression and stop giving people shit about cursing. Your problem, if you have one, needs to be with what is being expressed, not how.