A blue streak

Andrew Berthoff over at Blogpipe had an interesting post this morning about swearing. He references an article suggesting that swearing can be good for you because it relieves stress, and comments on the role of swearing in a pipe band setting. It got me thinking, and I realized I haven’t seriously considered my stance on swearing recently.

For a time in high school I promised myself I didn’t swear, and in college that changed somewhat. Recall that I went to a military college, and being in that environment I started swearing like, well, a soldier. I never went as far as some of my classmates though, some of whom were completely incapable of switching from their conversation from “barracks mode” to “classroom mode” to “polite conversation mode.” After college I went through another phase of trying to convince myself that I didn’t swear, but the words have slowly crept back in to my vocabulary since then.

I don’t really have anything against swearing, but I like to think that I’m intelligent enough to be able to express myself without resorting to profanity. Indeed, coming with alternate swears is kind of fun, and people look at you kind of funny when you say something like “Oh snot, I dropped my phone.” Try it sometime.

I have some friends who cuss blue streaks, and I don’t really think of as serious adults. Punctuating every sentence with a full complement of naughty words seems juvenile to me. On a similar vein I don’t like comedians who rely on bad language or racy subjects to be funny, as I think it’s much funnier to write clean content; case in point is “Who’s On First,” which is perfectly clean and one the funniest things ever recorded. Some TV shows on the premium cable networks like HBO and Showtime tend to throw in a lot of bad language, and it strikes me as something they do just because they can. It doesn’t have the same shock value when it’s gratuitous.

I’m a classroom teacher now, and I find myself very careful of what I say. I’ve heard stories of casually said things coming back to bite the sayer, and I figure the best way to not be the sayer is to not say something controversial. My students are relatively mature when I get them as juniors and seniors, but they’re still teenagers. I don’t have a problem dropping the occasional D or H in class; it usually gets some giggles and brings the daydreaming students back to reality. Anything more potent than that though is very rarely heard coming from me, especially if there are students nearby.

Yes, I swear, but as with anything else, moderation is the key. Except in piping; give me as much of that as I can get.