Is it perhaps another symptom of my untethered spirit?
The tongue, perhaps, being so much the closer to the brain than the hands is more easily influenced to corruption by the Mr. Hyde within. Proof to the latter being that I am far less likely to type an inappropriate word or phrase than to say it, even when angered. And I have never felt the urge to write a swear word in the sand with my foot.
Never may be an exaggeration, still it has been long enough that I cannot recall a specific instance.
It has been proved that swearing from the mouth can mitigate certain kinds of pain. I wonder if this also works for anger. If the pain from stubbing my toe in a dark room can be lessened by singing fuck into the air with a strong enough wind to carry it to all of the bedrooms in the house, can it also ameliorate my displeasure when I feel I have been crossed? Also, does it work for people who use sign language? Can they lessen their fury with swears of the hands? Or is there something in expelling the air? Are we ejecting a tiny piece of tainted soul that is corrupting our bodies? Or, like a locomotive, is the smoke we're releasing just evidence of the fire within? Or is the swear word not an indication of our internal selves at all?
I don't know. I'm tempted toward belief in the latter, though I must disclose that I swear a good bit and I would hate to think of my soul as being corrupt, especially by something so mundane as a growing thesaurus of vile words. So I have a bias in the argument.
I was born of a word puritan and a word libertine. My mother has spoken the word "Damn" twice in my memory; each time a quote. My father has scarcely gone a day without saying it. In the 80s "shit" was all the rage; especially in what is to me a nostalgic phrase, "Well, shit fire!" A turn that I'm certain is much more entertaining to say and hear than it is to do. The phrase "God Dammit" was highly frowned upon, and "fuck" was forbidden. In my life my father has said "fuck" only a handful of times and never in the same state as my mother.
I knew all of the cuss words by middle school, roughly age 11. Some will be invented in the fullness of time, and some will lose their punch, but as they stand right now I know them and have so for some 33 years. It's something that young children share on the bus and in the quiet corners of the classroom when the teachers are not around, or are not paying attention. But knowing is not using. Not all children will take that danger path from the verbal straight and narrow into the murky fields or corruption.
I did not say a lot of bad words when I was in middle school. "Bitch" was funny to say, especially with incorrect context or meaning. "What the bitch?" was something I might have said within earshot of a given friend who would laugh at it. But it wasn't in anger. I did not begin saying cuss words in anger until my life took a turn down a road I never wanted it to go and got hopelessly lost trying to find a short-cut back to the highway. There may be causality there, but in which direction?
Never once has saying, "God Dammit" corrected a wrong. More often it compounds the problem by upsetting my listening children, or angering my wife because my listening children are, in fact, listening. It has, at times, lessened my own anger. Though whether it lessened the anger because I had expelled some frustrated steam or because of the immature humor felt from figuratively stepping my toe over the line of maturity and into the sand of the taboo, I do not know. Science has not answered this to my satisfaction. Or is it just that said utterance caused immediate embarrassment at my personal loss of control which countered my anger?
What I can tell you is that prior to the scenic route my life has taken I never said, "God Dammit." Ever. Now it is a daily phrase. Every time something goes awry, from spilling paint on my favorite pants to discovering someone else ate the last Pop Tart that was never meant for me. "Fuck" won't do. "Shit" and "Dammit" do not come close. Only "God Dammit" makes me feel an inconsequential amount better. Except that it doesn't really.
I wonder if, rather than being causally related to my problems, it is instead a symptom of my lack of discipline. That same untethered spirit that doesn't want to practice music or practice drawing or re-edit a story, and subsequently never has a truly refine piece of art, is the one that doesn't want to care about the words coming out of my mouth.
