This, I Swear
An ode to my favorite bits of spoken profanity, and a consideration of alternatives.
I’ve got to learn to watch my mouth.
I’ve always had an unfortunate propensity for profanity in my speaking. I’m not proud of this; I am a grown adult with kids and a job and a mortgage, and I do not need to be speaking like I am a middle-schooler trying to sound cool on the playground. I should be able to get through my day without swearing.
It’s tough, though.
I made some stumbling efforts at cleaning up my language when I first became a parent, but I wasn’t really successful. I suddenly have a much greater motivation to fix it, though: my third-grader has started calling me out on it.
Daddy, no swearing!
I’d like to take this as a sign that I’m doing something right as a parent—he knows those words are bad, and he knows he’s not supposed to say them—but it’s also exposing my hypocrisy, and I don’t care for that. (I much prefer to keep my hypocrisies unchallenged.) I’ve offered up the concept of a swear jar, a concept that—once I explained it—he showed a great deal of interest in.
(He loves a get-rich-quick scheme, and I’m not entirely sure he wouldn’t start tricking me into swearing more if we did institute one.)
Unless I want to go broke, though, I’d better start considering ways I can clean up my language. With that in mind, today I’d to review some of my most-used curse words, and examine potential alternatives for each of them.
(Profanity ahead. You can’t say you weren’t warned.)
Bullshit
I love calling things bullshit, which makes sense, because so many things these days are bullshit.
Paying $70 in fees on a $90 concert ticket? That’s bullshit.
A news article claiming that a long-successful business is declaring bankruptcy because of ‘declining sales’, then burying in the 17th paragraph the truth that they were acquired by a private equity firm in a leveraged buyout and saddled with debt? Quit bullshitting us.
Logging in to check sports scores and being inundated with gambling information? I don’t want to see this bullshit.
Everything about James Corden, just like, in general? Bullshit.
It feels good to call something bullshit, it just doesn’t feel good when you do it and realize your kid was listening.
Fortunately, this is a curse with a lot of viable alternatives:
Baloney. Malarkey. Hogwash. Rot. Poppycock.
Sure, most of these make you sound like you’re 100 years old, but that lends a bit of gravitas, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s one thing for me to tell you that something is bullshit, but when someone alive for the stock market crash of 1929 calls it codswallop? Well, now you’re listening.