It never ceases to amaze me how people can be controlled by words. Words of hate, threatening words, words of love. They’re just sounds we hear or characters we see. They’re nothing more than we let them be.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

Well, we all know that can be untrue. Children can grow strong and healthy when fed a diet of nice words, and they can grow weak and sick on a diet of harsh words. Words can hit harder than fists when thrown in anger between people who love each other. Words can heal wounds and stop wars.

Markus Zusak illustrated the dichotomy between the power of words and the emptiness of them more beautifully in The Book Thief than I ever could here. So, I’ll stop that whimsy and get to the words I want to talk about.

The words that interest me right now are of the four letter variety: swear words, cuss words, vulgarities, obscenities, colorful words, offensive words, expletives. It never ceases to amaze me that people are controlled by those words.

True story—I spent the first six years of my life with my mother, my (much) older sister and my father. My best friend was a boy across the street who had a (much) older brother and two (much, much) older sisters. He’d have been aptly named, “Accident.” Happy, endearing accident though, he was. My sister and his siblings were friends. It was a time in history when hand-rolled cigarettes gave off a sweet, woody aroma. Lava lamps were lit and stared at for no obvious reason. Secret envelopes contained tiny little squares of magic and people wore really ugly plaid pants, unruly hairstyles and ridiculous circle-shaped sunglasses. And my parents had long and loud discussions with my sister almost every night, inadvertently homeschooling me with my first vocabulary lessons. My accidental best friend’s family was holding English class for him in a loud and dramatic way across the street.

He and I communicated well, but being not yet school aged, we were unaware that our words would be deemed “bad” by the larger society. One day a new girl moved onto our block. She seemed about our age, so we went to welcome her to our little community,

“Hey, there fucker,” One of us said.

“What’s your name, little shit?” Said another.

“My God damned house is down the street.”

“And my shit-hole is over there.”

And on it went. I can’t say I remember much about the whole thing. I do recall us talking in our normal dialect and the new child becoming hysterical and running inside, to which we probably replied—

“What the fuck is wrong with her ass?”

“I don’t know, maybe she’s high.”

Yes, we were crude. We were children and still learning.

I do know that the incident was re-told at just about every family gathering from that date forward, my mom having to blink back tears of laughter along the way. The child’s mother called one of our mothers and told her of the conversation and informed her that the child would not be allowed to play with us. That mother called the other and after a day on the phone, things were smoothed out between all the neighbors. I also know that I can’t remember ever actually playing with the new girl, so maybe it was just all superficially smoothed.

Eventually, I learned where and when to swear, and I worked up a pretty good vocabulary over the years. I’m a creative, educated, moral and strong woman. I’ve never really found a reason NOT to swear when I feel like it.

In college, I took a writer’s workshop series. On the first day of class, the professor said that it was his obligation to inform us, his students in this Jesuit university, that the pieces we would be reading would in fact contain language that some of us might find objectionable. He said he would not argue this point and that if anyone was going to have a problem with that, they could drop the class immediately and get a full refund and he’d personally assist them in getting into a different, comparable class. Nobody left. Later in the class, he had us go around the room and use our favorite vulgarity in a sentence, to help us overcome any squeamishness about words. Words were our tools, as writers. We couldn’t let any of them be unusable. We could choose not to use some words, out of preference, but we couldn’t let any of them be out of our reach because only we feared them. It seemed I had found a niche.

Until I used the word “cunt” in a story the second semester. All worthwhile discussion about the rest of the story fell aside and for two hours, the entire class debated that one word instead. It was unbelievable. I had never thought that a single word could enrage so many people on so many levels. It was frightening. There were those who were offended by the word itself and those who were offended that people could get offended by a word. And round and round it went.

One woman asked me, “How can you be a woman and use that word? It’s insulting and demeaning to women.”

I replied, “How can you be a woman and be bothered by that word? It’s our word. If you let it demean you, then you’re giving it away.”

And that was pretty much the long and short of the discussion that took so very long and got nowhere (and exhausted a lot of wine—this class met at a bar off campus). It seemed everyone took a place on one side of the word or the other.

When my son was a toddler, he mimicked me as all children will do. I heard him mutter, “Dammit” as he tried to spear a chunk of watermelon with a fork. One day at the store, his father would not buy him something he wanted and my son blurted out, “You assenhole!” Why he added that “en” we don’t know, but the meaning was clear. After my husband and I took turns hiding behind an advertisement display to purge our giggles, we lectured him sternly about language and disrespect.

For a while, we tried to enforce a rule of no cuss words. We did the soap in the mouth thing. But, then I got really tired of sitting in the bathroom, gagging on a yellow sliver of Dial, and said, “You know, fuck this shit, I am a grown up, I can drink alcohol and drive a car and work a God-damned job. Grown ups get to do things that kids do not, and swearing is one of them!” So, we trained our kids in a different way.

My oldest is thirteen. I’m sure he swears when he’s with his friends. I’m positive of it. I’ve blogged about it—here! He’s probably taught them some words that they didn’t know, thanks to me, and I could probably learn some new ones from him if I asked. But, part of learning to be a grown up is learning boundaries and when and where it’s OK to swear. I don’t swear at church. I don’t swear when I need to be professional at work. I don’t swear when I’m talking with my kids’ teachers. I don’t swear in front of my kids’ friends. But, I do swear when I write, I do swear when socializing with friends, and I do swear in the privacy of my own home, among my family. I know not everyone would approve, and some may even be appalled, but for some reason it works. My children don’t go around swearing like gangsters in front of me, I’ve never been called from a teacher for use of inappropriate language, no church lady has ever fainted while conversing with my children, because they understand that adults do adult things and kids do kid things. A lesson that takes so very few words, and which would have gone a long way in helping my accidental friend and me in our adventure with language, had our parents sprinkled us with some of them.

There was a time when I tried to reign it in a little. Not that I typically go around cussing at every opportunity. But, I would stop myself and think about my word choice carefully, trying out a different, non-swear word in the place of the one that was on the tip of my tongue. I do sometimes think that swearing can be habitual and other, more creative words could be left unused because we slip into what’s reflexive. I’d save those precious little gems for when they were truly called for. But, that got tedious, all the stopping and thinking and running through my cerebral thesaurus. Most of the time the word I had planned to use was the most apt anyway. I also think that living your whole life as if you’re around polite company can’t be good for you.

There are words I don’t use. Because of what I am and who I am, I can never own them. Those words don’t belong to me, so my saying them would only be for fighting. Those words belong to other people, and out of respect for those people, I don’t use their words. My choice NOT to use certain words speaks as loudly as another person’s choice to use them. Silence, filling a space with the void of a word, is communicative, too.

Words are powerful, and meaningless. There are those who let words control them, and who cower and flinch at the sound or sight of them. Others control the words, freeing them to do their work and calling them back when they’re finished. You can take all words known to man, stack them up end-to-end and never bridge the distance between the two groups.

Word.

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