Swearing

Well, it finally happened. We were in the kitchen and I was going through the mail when I opened some unexpected bill, some medical expense or lingering tax payment that invariably sends me into a fiery tailspin and I let out a long, sustained, Whitlockian "SHIT," which caused Liz to ask "what's wrong?" which caused Rocky to understand that that word gets reactions, which in turn caused him to say—more perfectly enunciated than any of the times he has told me he loves me, mind you—"SHIT." Then, a few days later, while I was changing his clothes he, unprompted out of nowhere, blurted out "what the fuck?" and proceeded to ask if what he said was funny. I told him it was not despite the fact that it totally was. 

We knew this was coming. I deserve it. I was a precocious provocateur as a child. Apparently—I have no memory of this but I do not doubt it happened—as a toddler I once called my mother a word I’m choosing to not even write, who knows where I heard it, and it was explained to me that I would not use it again without consequences. So it’s in Rocky’s blood. In the face of his increased ability to mimic Liz and I have long told each other we need to stop swearing around him. It's just that I like swearing. It feels good. Emma Bryne, in her book Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language, argues that profanity promotes trust in others, is beneficial to teamwork and even increases our tolerance to pain. And yet, I don't want my children doing it. In truth, I wish I didn't swear as much. I have long admired my brother's ability to abstain, it seems so reasoned and controlled, like he has total power of his own speech. We too often think of freedom as the ability to do whatever you want but true freedom is not being slavish to your worst desires. I come from a line of non-profaners, my sailorish tendencies are the exception. I once saw my uncle get kicked in the groin—a groin that had been recently operated on to remove a hernia —by a cow and his choice not to swear is the manliest thing I've ever witnessed, especially considering that I, at age 13, must have muttered under my breath "fuck, that had to hurt."

Still, English speakers are good at swearing, so much so that the French during the Hundred Years War called the English "godons" because of their habit of continually screaming "God damn." We have words about the paraphernalia of swearing. Did you know that the symbols used by cartoonists to indicate bad words—!$@*, et cetera—are called grawlixes? And the phenomena that Bryne describes, of using cussing to relieve pain, is called lalochezia.

Of course, as much as we like to swear in English, most of our favorite words come from abroad. It's not that we can't invent our own swears but only Shakespeare, who called characters "whoreson" dozens of times throughout his plays, was a master and how many Shakespeares are there? Besides, saying to someone "Away, you starvelling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish!” is only for special occasions. For everyday use, we get our curse words from abroad, mainly from Germany, which gave us "fuck" and "shit." Germans are such believers in the power of productive swearing, there is a 24-hour hotline called Schimpf-los (translated as "swear away") where people can call and fling obscenities at the operators for no other reason than to blow off steam. The service was adopted in 2012, if it had been adopted in 1912, when the Germans, um, appeared in need of blowing off some steam, who knows how different the world might be. 

Except for when I'm swearing, I do not speak German. I wish I could. I love any language that feels the need to give full words to someone who parks his car in the shade ("schattenparker") and to whisper angrily ("zischeln") but makes "ostrich" and a "bunch of flowers" share the same word ("Strauss"). I love their ability to give long names to things that often need to be said in a hurry, exemplified by the fact that the German word for "contraceptive" is Schwangerschaftsverhütungsmittel. Our word "flak" is an abbreviation of Fliegerabwehrkanone, which means "pilot warding-off cannon." I guess screaming out "Watch out for that Fliegerabwehrkanone!" became untenable. 

I find the ability to speak other tongues incredibly envious. I always imagined that I would know several languages, James Bond-style, by the time I was my age but I'm starting to realize that it may not be a skill I possess. I took French in high school and none of it stuck even after three years. Perhaps it is that country's aversion for all things American that make it difficult to pick up. This is a language that invented the word motdièse in 2013 to avoid using the embarrassingly gauche "hashtag." They didn't even have a word for French kissing until a few years ago, when galocher ("to kiss with tongues") entered the dictionary in 2014. I took two years of Latin in college thinking that learning a root language would unlock the secret of the other Romantic tongues and it would be like learning four or five languages for the price of one. When I found out how foreign and inefficient Latin was—my professors couldn't even speak it, only read and write it—I knew it was a lost cause. Latin words are all based on different cases which change their meanings depending on how they are used. In this way, word order means nothing so even a simple sentence like "I like cats" can be theoretically said "Cats I like," "Cats like I," "Like I cats," "Like cats I" or "I cats like" and all mean the same thing. There are some things that should be dead. 

My grandfather was the last one in my immediate family who could speak Polish and many Renkoskis, including me, have tried to learn it to keep some connection with the old country. Like our national ability to change a light bulb, our attempts have resulted in failure and hilarity. I don't know why I thought, after French and Latin, Polish would be the language that made it all click but it was definitely not. To understand a little bit about how difficult Polish is for an English speaker, know that in the Polish version of Scrabble, the letter Z is worth one point. Still, when we were in Warsaw a number of years ago, I had studied hard to memorize a few phrases, basically enough to say "Hello. I cannot speak much Polish"—that part should have been obvious enough to any native speaker by my pronunciation—"Do you speak English?" Someone approached us on the street and asked for directions and incredibly I understood his question, knew the answer and knew how to say it, casually replying and sending the guy on his way. It was the coolest I've ever looked in front of my wife and I know that I've forgotten so much of what little I knew in the first place that it could never happen again. 

Perhaps Rocky will be better at languages than I am. He's certainly seeming to master this one at an increasingly rapid pace, swearing notwithstanding. And English is no easy language. In "Pacific Ocean," a place name that is not exactly uncommon, the letter c is pronounced three different ways, what kind of shit is that? As for Effie, I eagerly anticipate her first word and the roughly 860 million that come after it. But until then I am reminded of something I learned in Latin class, that the word infant comes from the Latin word that means "unable to speak."