Remedying the rhetorical curse of cursing

By Tim Ellison
The Collegian

DARN. SHUCKS. SHOOT.

These are a few of the words I’m slowly kneading into my vocabulary, hoping that they’ll replace some unsavory words that pass my lips just a bit too often.

Over the past couple years I’ve developed a peculiar taste for dropping the F-word in unexpected places. People often laugh if it’s used with discretion, but discretion is hard to maintain.

I’ve found myself using it as a joke, to express anger, even to quietly remark to myself about how today’s meal at the campus cafeteria tasted. The worst is when I say it without even thinking about it, sliding it in to replace words like “surprisingly” and “disappointingly.”

But golly, I’m getting ahead of myself. What’s really so bad about cursing anyway? There are the religious reasons I suppose, and those do matter to me, but there are also some more pragmatic reasons why I think all people should disarm their store of F-Bombs.

First, they’re a vocabulary crutch. People who can’t put their exact thoughts into words rely upon curse words to fill the gaps in their speech.

Professors occasionally do the same thing with technical terms that nobody in the class really understands, but those can create a profitable illusion of intelligence and confidence; curse words do nothing of the sort.

One of the most common habits of unintelligent people is an inability to control language. Gee-whiz, I heard conversations in junior-high and high school that would have made baby Jesus cry, but I hear these same curse words used by some of my genuinely intelligent friends in college.

Such words can give false first-impressions and create the feeling of unintelligence even when a person might be smart, and they certainly won’t help when we leave college for the workplace.

Second, cursing has more victims than we might expect. Hundreds of great adverbs have met their demise at the hands of curse words.

The F-word is particularly nasty. It can be manipulated to take the place of nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, like a little virus in our vocabularies (but rest assured, the prepositions are safe). We have to make sure to protect our endangered words.

Finally, you have to do it for the kids. Children will mimic pretty much anything adults do, and children need to have a period in their early lives when they get to understand that language is for solving problems and expressing emotions positively. The only way for that to happen is by a positive example from the adults in our communities.

Now criminey, I won’t deny that the occasional curse word can be clever or attention grabbing, but most of us really don’t have that many clever things to say.

You’re better off keeping most of your ideas to yourself when it comes right down to it, especially the ones that need a curse word or two to jolt them to life.

So do what you have to do. Make a swear-jar and put in 25 cents for charity every time you swear.

Do like I do and let your friends slug you in the arm every time they hear you mutter some obscenity.

You can think of some way to cut down, and it’s worth doing.

And I’ll be right there with you, massaging my badly bruised arms.

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