Disclaimer

I swear a lot. The more I become fired up about something the more I swear. I suffer no guilt over it. Of course, being who I am, I make every attempt to ensure that I'm in appropriate company while cursing like a sailor. I'm not out to offend anyone. But if I'm in the company of friends, I frequently use filthy words to say what's on my filthy mind.

What's the big deal about swearing anyway? And again, I'm talking about in the context of adult conversation. Let's think about this a minute, shall we?

Take the word "fuck" for instance. It's thought to be one of the top "dirty" words. While growing up in a Mormon household, my family always had Mormon missionaries at our home. These poor kids were forbidden all sorts of things...swearing among them. So, those crafty little geniuses brewed up a clever way of circumventing the system. Instead of saying "fuck", they'd say "flip". So, "It's so fucking hot riding this fucking bicycle in these fucking dark blue slacks all over fucking town," became...you got it...nice and cleaned up: "It's so flippin' hot riding this flippin' bicycle in these flippin' dark blue slacks all over flippin' town." Sounds nice and squeaky clean doesn't it?

So the question is, isn't "flip" then a swear word? If you use a "clean" word in place of a "dirty" word, does it at all alter the actual meaning of what you're trying to convey?

My oldest sister will almost literally go into a convulsive attack when she hears the words "nasty" or "discard". She loathes the sounds of those two words for some odd twisted repressed psycho reason. They are the equivalent of swear words to her. I've been cracked over the head by her on more than one occasion as I've run through the house yelling, "Nasty discard! Nasty discard!"

As a society, a culture, as a whatever, we've assigned meaning to words. In Ireland, if you'd like a banger, you'd like a sausage. In America if you said you'd like to bang 'er, well...you know what you'd like.

It's all just a load of crap. There you go!! Growing up, my mother would bellow, "CRAP" but freak out if we said a swear word. Who dictated that "crap", an altogether icky word in my book, is an okayish borderline word and that "shit" is worthy of a pop on the mouth. Why is it more acceptable to say that "the cow took a crap on my foot" than "the cow took a shit on my foot"? Either way, you've got one hell of a mess.

Anyway...this is my disclaimer. I swear a lot and my blogs will most likely contain profuse amounts of it at times. So there you go. Reader beware.