foul language, or, learning to love the F-bomb

My mother dropped the F-bomb at the dining room table last summer.

What you have to understand is that my mother, when my brother and I were growing up, very rarely cursed. My father threw around enough goddamnits and son of a bitches, generally after hammering a thumb or stubbing a toe or disagreeing quite adamantly with a call in a closely contested sporting event of some sort, that I became sort of enured to them. Sometimes it was even funny.

My mother, on the other hand, cursed so seldomly that on the very rare occasion you made her angry enough to declare, "You little shithead!" you knew you had seriously, seriously fucked up.*

(Years and years later I shared an apartment with a woman who had a fondness for calling people shitheads. It took months of living together for me to stop cringing every time this burst from her lips, though eventually I learned to hear it without a sense of having gravely disappointed someone I admire and adore. Funny what it takes to reclaim or relearn or unlearn certain words and the emotions that go with them. I tried to convince Nick over dinner the other night to say truck twenty times fast and then describe what the word felt like. This trick always amazed me when I was a kid, the idea that you could reduce a word to mere sound simply by repeating it over and over again. He wouldn't do it, but it reminded me of another time not long after college when two friends and I spent a night, after imbibing certain illicit substances, watching mushrooms grow in the potted herbs on the windowsill and saying, for what felt like hours, and to great gales of uncontrollable laughter, various iterations of "Bitch you FUCK, you fuck BITCH, bitch fuck YOU." Eventually, of course, the words became meaningless. But even now, almost ten years later, seeing them scrawled on a bathroom door at the Bowery Ballroom last night before a Dave Rawlings Machine show were enough to make me chuckle.)

Five or six years ago my mother began, on occasion, exclaiming "Fuckity fuck fuck!" She would explain each time that because it was "in quotes" it wasn't really cursing (and besides, it was a quote and not hers!). I guess this meant she could still claim a certain mantle of innocence, but it always made me laugh and it quickly became something of a joke between us. Eventually "Fuckity fuck fuck!" wormed its way into my own vocabulary, always with air quotes of course, and almost always correctly sourced and cited (I am a pseudo-librarian, after all).

But one July morning last year as we sat around the table drinking coffee and reading the papers, in a moment of unadulterated news-inspired angst, my mother just said, "Fuck." And my mouth dropped open. I turned to her, stunned, and said, "Mom, what happened to the quotes?"

She looked up, and looked rather aghast at herself, and said, "Bush and those Republicans took the quotes away."**

*Just for the record, I love the word "fuck." I try not to say it in polite company, of course, but I abso-fucking-lutely love it. I love the sound of it, the quick harshness of it, and the fact that, as is so amusingly described in its Wikipedia entry, it can be used for (and added to) almost everything.

**While I would be willing to swear on my mother's good name that this story is 100% true, it may be slightly more of an apocryphal thing than a canonical thing, if you catch my drift.