Oh, I am going to be showing my age with this one….

Swearing used to be a rite of passage.  As a youngster, you didn’t dare use “damn”, or “hell” or else your tongue would turn black and fall out of your mouth.  Or so my Mother told me, and I believed her.  She was my Mom, for heavens sake.  Mom wouldn’t lie.  And I never heard her use those words.

Now my Dad was a different breed of cat.  If he smacked his finger with a hammer a string of the forbidden words would come out of him like a river busting a dam.  Or damn….see what I did there?  Clever.  But once that torrent was out, if I were around he would admonish me to not use that kind of language, and also not to tell Mom.

And then there were my brothers.  Older siblings are a wonderful gift to those of us who are at the end of the propagation chain.  Older sibs blaze the trails that us younger ones will be exploring years later.  Older sibs also wear our parents down so that us younger ones get away with a lot more than what our older sibs did.  It is a glorious arrangement….for us youngers.

Anyhoo….the point that I am trying to make is that I learned more of how to use curse words from my brothers than I did from my parents.  So, you might ask?  So, in todays world the use of expletives is gotten to be common place.

Common place in daily casual conversation by young and old.  The use of some curse words that were explicitly NOT to be used in public have become very common place.

And you know which ones I am talking about.  Interspersing the F-word, and specifically the C-word in conversation has become that norm.

I don’t necessarily find it offensive…the language you use is your business, but I do find it interesting how people like to push the boundaries of what is acceptable.  When I would be dealing with an upset customer, it was always interesting to me as to how quickly they would go from regular language to cursing at me depending upon whether they were going to get their way or not.  With women it happened a whole lot quicker than with men.  It was as if women had to get aggressive quicker to show that they meant business, whereas men would go into debate mode.  And that isn’t true of every interaction I had with customers.  Not every person reacts the same way.

How do you react to the use of curse words in conversation?  Have we become immune to it?  Does it underline our lack of civility?  Did we ever have any civility to begin with?  Is this behavior something we want our children to exhibit as they grow and go out into the world?  I have my thoughts, but I am really interested in hearing yours.

Comment link is at the bottom.  I look forward to hearing what you have to say.  Even if it is full of swear words…..