Parts of Speech

Here’s a thought experiment: You ask your 12-year-old niece to back your 1968 Pontiac Catalina out of your driveway. She claims she’s up to the job, but she hits some ambient trash cans, because she’s 12. Which of these responses most appropriately meets the moment?

1. “Don’t worry, sugar, that’s why I let Charlie LaPorte sell me comprehensive instead of collision.”

Or 

2. “Goddamn baby, you told me you could drive.”

If you selected Choice 1, then I honor your discipline, but you make me a little sad. Choice 2 conveys the same emotional information as Choice 1, but the content is delivered with an engagingly raised eyebrow. Choice 1 is a reliable Toyota Camry, not a ‘68 Catalina with a 400-cubic inch engine. Choice 2, uttered by my Uncle Vern, wields profanity like a muscle car, not a sedan with a baby seat in the back. Any Yahoo can conjugate the verb “to fuck,” but crude, predictable profanity is the opposite of an artfully placed expletive. Vern and his tribe were fluent in artful swear words, and watching their work was one of the joys of my childhood.

My mother’s family was the lucky recipient of DNA that made them conversant in swearing. David Foster Wallace’s essay “This Is Water” reminds us that fish don’t know what they’re swimming in–they’re just swimming. Similarly, the people in my mother’s family weren’t swearing–they were just talking. A family friend (unrelated) illustrated the “this is talking/water” phenomena when he described a pickup truck in the presence of our small child. “It’s full of goddamn shit,” Richard said, in disgust. Then noticing our child and her father, he walked the statement back: “Stuff. It’s full of goddamn stuff.”

The people in my matrilineal line were not more coarse or profane than other farmers in western Oklahoma. They were expressive, resilient, and damn funny, with an extra profanity widget in their toolkit, like a recessive gene that gives you blue eyes or gives your kitty six toes. For example, these people had an early electric generator system that powered family members’ homes within a couple-of-miles radius. When a tree limb fell on a live wire, it brought several hundred volts of Roosevelt-era power within easy reach of a couple of my baby uncles, who were wandering mostly unsupervised around a barnyard. Grandfather Jack saw the danger and raced toward them yelling, “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Don’t do that!” This story persists into the 21st century because baby uncles turned his warning into a song: They danced around the power line lisping “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, don’t do that!” in babytalk. No child was electrocuted, and babies taking the Lord’s name in vain became an affectionate family story. So it follows, as the night the day, that when Uncle Vern grew up to take his own children to mass, the tots roared with laughter at his loud “Goddammit!” when an usher banged him with the collection-basket-on-a-stick.  

My own children had an early, instinctive knowledge of their family’s rhetorical gift. After spending summers with my brothers and various cousins at our Oklahoma farm, Oldest Daughter became fluent in code switching. At the farm, mother’s people are swear-y. In Austin with father’s people, not so much. Re-entry to Austin required a period of adjustment, which I once watched Baby Daughter painfully navigate. After a long drive home from the farm, she muttered “shit” after dropping a toy. Her father gently asked her to go to her room and think about the words we use, and then come back for supper. When she returned, she was clutching a wooden puzzle piece of Oklahoma from her 50-state puzzle map. “I just want to go back to Oklahoma,” she wept. To which that part of the family might respond: Hell yes, Sister.

My patriarchal line had many fine qualities, but they didn’t go in for swearing. My father’s family was Methodist and Quaker by way of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. These ranchers were a disciplined bunch, and they had aspirations of indoor plumbing. They were gifted raconteurs, but their tales never used profanity as a punchline. The strongest interjection I ever heard from my grandfather Elijah was “thunder”; his tone, not his vocabulary, did the work there, but his meaning was pretty damn clear. 

Sometimes talents skip a generation. I myself have no special gifts in the profanity department; more of a yeoman’s proficiency. I respect those who use their gifts well, but I’m playing a different hand and am apparently kept in check by a latent Quaker super-ego. When Daughter #1 was toddling, I knew nothing about children’s language development (or anything else about babies), and no one advised me to self-censor as my heart’s darling lay down her language-acquisition neurons. Imagine the shock, then, when my child tripped on the floor and uttered one of her first words: “shit.” In my subsequent nightmare, wee daughter sat at a table with me drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. My dream baby told me, confidently: “Colleen, I hear everything you say. And I understand all of it.” Well then. Roger that.

Either through nature or nurture, my literate, practically grown children may have inherited the ancestral gift of artful profanity, As evidence, I submit The Compound Word Game. As a first grader, Daughter #2 invented The Compound Word Game, which for a time was played as a family bloodsport. The rules are: Bored children in a car survey the landscape for signs or infrastructure composed of compound words. Then they bellow out the word that comes to mind: “Sidewalk. Compound word.” Players frequently get lazy, overreach, or just cheat to see who’s paying attention. Not OK: Two words like turning lane or frontage road, or words with prefixes or suffixes, like program or tireless. Players are self-policing and the game can acquire a bitchy vibe near mealtimes.

So join me on a recent driving lesson with Daughter #2. The scene is a chilly winter evening on Burnet Road, and, for self-preservation, the Licensed Adult Driver is mapping a route home that involves only protected left turns. As we approached our turn, near North Loop, I said, rather nostalgically, “Stoplight. Compound word.” My student driver reflected, “I was thinking the same thing.” For the next few seconds, my brain went all Hallmark card-y as I reflected on wee tots playing The Compound Word Game in a minivan, and the circle of life that brought them, ultimately, into the driver’s seat. Then I recognized that my student driver was preparing to turn left on a green light, assuming the signal would stop the oncoming traffic as a protected green arrow would. “Goddamn it!” said the Licensed Adult Driver. “Don’t turn in front of the traffic!” 

After the successful left turn, I took up the nostalgic thread again to help regulate my breathing. “You know, you used to play Compound Word from the back seat,” I began. “And now you’re sitting in the driver’s seat. You’re so grown up now.” I was well on the path to teary and maudlin. “And now I’m yelling swear words at you. Which I wouldn’t have done then. Like goddamn it.” Then came the epiphany. An insight into the classification of words that had never occurred to me before. And I said, rather wondrously: “Goddamn. Compound word.” 

What subsequently poured forth from my child was a rush of language on the order of speaking in tongues. She vomited out a string of multi-syllable words as if channeling Linda Blair in The Exorcist: “Cocksucker. Compound word. Dickbrain. Compound word. Motherfucker. Compound word.” Daughter #2 continued in this vein for several minutes, because she’s a competitive child. I offered up a phrase I’d seen on a sign at a Scottish golf course protesting Donald Trump: “Shitgibbon. Compound word”; my contribution was dismissed with, “Meh. Two words.” Still and all, a mic-drop moment for Compound Word.

If I want to continue to be competitive in Compound Word 2.0, I may have to find a parking place on campus in order to read this eighteenth-century book at the Harry Ransom Center: An Admonition Against Common and Corrupt Swearing. In a Letter from a Minister to His Parishioner. To Be Put Privately Into the Hands of Persons Who Are Addicted to Swearing, by Edmond Gibson. I’m a little in love with the title. And I’m powerfully curious about the difference between common and corrupt swearing. Edmond Gibson just might be conducting a master class in profanity. It’s my great hope that Gibson was pervy enough to make a compendium of his era’s most fun, most salacious swear vocabulary, in one convenient volume, and chock-full of profane compound words from 1770.  And here’s the thing: the Ransom Center’s copy is the 19th edition. A hearty number of people apparently wanted that book put privately into their hands.

If Gibson produced at least 19 editions of Admonition, he must have made some bank telling people to clean up their language.  But irony is dying as I report that Netflix is making a similar pile of money by giving folks a platform to swear rather a lot. I watched Nicholas Cage host the service’s rather disappointing The History of Swear Words, and here’s the short version. 

•  Profanity is a form of self expression. Who doesn’t know this? Please raise your hands, losers, so we can mock you.
• Fuck is a very versatile word. Watch the first five minutes of Four Weddings and a Funeral, then discuss.
• One tidbit, though, broke a bit of new ground: Profanity makes us stronger. Netflix put several of its experts’ hands into ice water and timed how long they could keep them there. Half the experts got to swear, and half didn’t. The swearing participants kept their hands in longer, no comparison. It’s just science.

So swearing isn’t just for emphasis and giggles; it’s our super power. Clever! And fun! But in my own family, how does that work for my Quaker, non-swear-y relations? There can’t possibly be much juice in thunder, dangnabit, or mother-forking shirtballs.

My Quaker great-grandfather Lyman, born in Indiana, famously recited the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley as he came to breakfast each morning. Grandfather Lyman was a superfan. I have been to Riley’s sweet house in Greenfield, but I’m not. I find his Indiana patois to be impenetrable: he’s all about swimmin’ holes, and punkins, and shadder for shadow. Still. My father once quoted for me a Riley stemwinder about bad luck and loss, and he allowed as how Grandfather Lyman must have thought about his dead baby as he recited it. Well, hell. If you’re a 19th century plain person and your baby drank lye and died, you won’t be bellowing “shit gibbon” (2 words) to process your grief. You’ll read your James Whitcomb Riley and find your Inner Light in the darkness. It’s possible that punkin was Quaker for motherfucker, uttered with the same enthusiasm that my maternal line might raise a hearty goddamn. 

My children don’t have to look far in their family tree to get lessons in resilience, delivered in both sacred and profane language. From their Oklahoma family alone, they can find a grim number of deaths by childhood illnesses and farm accidents; even more dramatically, there’s ill-fated Great-Aunt Nancy, the collateral damage of a vigilante aiming for one of her brothers who truly had it coming. In their defense against poverty, grief, and everyday hardships, those ancestors employed the weapons at hand: the faith found in their country churches, the comfort of poetry, and their wits. I would argue that the resilient-plus-funny option has its own grace, enhancing one’s efforts like an octane booster to your carburetor. But in truth, whatever vocabulary lets you keep your hand in ice water the longest is the right one. 

Goddamn baby, turn left on the green arrow. There you go.