On Swearing

(With apologies to my mother, who raised me better than this.)

My co-worker Laura often remarks that it doesn't matter if you say "dang" or "damn"-- the intent behind the word, she argues, is the same--so you might as well just use the actual swear.

She's wrong.

And I'm not saying she's wrong because I believe that swear words are somehow intrinsically bad. On the contrary, according to the Gospel of Me, there's nothing wrong with swear words, per se. I don't believe that God plucked a handful of choice words out of each of the living languages, declaring, "These words will I make evil, that the users thereof may be hewn down and cast into the fire." Cuss words are simply words, combinations of phonemes that, by no real fault of their own, have been cast out of the upper-class lexicons; that, through the complex webbing of a language's history, have come to be viewed as a little more crass, sharp, or inappropriate than other sound combinations. Not the sort of words that ought to be brought out at nice dinner parties. Not the sort of words you'd use in a job interview. Not the type of words you'd bring home to your mother.

So while it's unfair, I'm going to go ahead and assert here that there is a real difference between saying "Oh, shooty," and "Aw, shit," even if you mean essentially the same thing.

Why? The answer lies in culture. Language is about communication; communication is dependent on interpretation; interpretation is dependent on culture. So if the culture in which you function dictates that one way of expressing something is more acceptable than another, word choice-- even when expressing the same idea--will affect the people using and hearing it in very different ways. A speaker's "core intent" (the primary purpose of the communication) is only one small component of communication; a more essential consideration is the way this intent is expressed, particularly since "peripheral intent" (other, less essential, motivations for the communication) often emerges in the subtleties of word connotation.

For example, if a lady in Wal-Mart has been standing, for the past twenty minutes, right in front of the hair dyes you want to quickly peruse, your intent in communicating with her would be to get her to step aside for a moment so that you might quickly take a glance, select the "Dark Mahogany Brown," and get the heck out of the hair care aisle. You could communicate this core intent in a couple of different ways, depending on your peripheral intentions. For example, if you wanted to display your irritation, you could tap your foot impatiently and say, "In case you haven't noticed, I'm WAITING!" Or, if you were hoping to shame the woman, you might holler, "Move your big fat ass, lady!" Or perhaps you wanted everyone involved to feel like they'd been bathed in rainbows and butterflies at the end of your interaction. If this were the case, you might politely nudge your way in and say, "Excuse me, could you please schootch over a teensy weensy little bit while I take a quick gander at the Loreal hair dye products? Thanks! Thank you! Thanks so much! Sure do 'preciatecha!" The core intent of the three previous statements was the same, but in the varying expressions of this intent, three very different messages were sent to the oblivious hair-dye row blocker.

Or, say that one of your three roommates has contracted a stomach bug and it's fallen to you to explain to the other two that the bathroom needs to be kept clear in case of emergency. Depending on your peripheral intentions, you might choose one of the following ways of expressing this:

a) "Please know, darlings, that one of our dear companions has found herself with some digestive issues and will therefore need to be given unfettered access to the rest facilities for the next several hours."
b) "Try to be as fast as you can in the bathroom! Jill may need to run in at any moment!"
c) "Jill has the shits! Stay out of the can!"

And so it is with swearing. You might be saying essentially the same thing with a swear word or a swear substitute, but you express different things depending on which one you choose. "Goldarnit," for example, might mean,"I'm in pain, I'm angry, but I choose to remain within accepted cultural conventions in expressing my pain." "Goddammit," on the other hand, could communicate something like, "I'm in pain, I'm angry about it, and I'm willing to forgo social and/or religious norms in order to fully express my outrage."

And what if your intent in communicating is purely to shock and offend all within the range of your voice? You're not going to use a swear substitute: generally the point of using a swear substitute is to keep the offensiveness down to a minimum. If you're with a group of people you don't know well, you're more likely to describe a bad day as being "crappy," rather than "shitty." However, if you are with a group of people whom you think could stand some lightening up on the prudishness, you might intentionally choose to describe your day as "shitty" and then gleefully go on to describe the "stupid bastard" in the supermarket parking lot who took up not only two but three parking spaces with his "big-ass" pickup truck, watching with delight as your audience squirms uncomfortably and flushes a little red.

Another thing to consider is that a speaker's intent in using the same words or phrases will vary, depending on the recipient of the communication. If I were to flip off a stranger who had just cut me off in heavy traffic, he would probably interpret my communicative intent as being something along the lines of, "F--- you, you jerk." And I, knowing that the stranger would probably interpret my gesture in this way, would probably mean it that way. On the other hand, when I flip off my husband, he knows that what I mean is, "I'm annoyed with you right now and know that you will find this gesture to be both slightly offensive and somewhat amusing. So by flipping you off, I am simultaneously expressing frustration and diffusing a potentially tense situation through the use of humor." I know that he knows this, so I use the gesture without the intent of communicating its more...traditional...meaning.

And of course there's the possibility that you're spending time with a group of people to whom swear words--and not substitutes-- are the accepted norm. So if you stub your toe and say, "Oh fiddlesticks!" instead of "Oh damn!" you are using your choice of language to both express discomfort and differentiate yourself from your peers, perhaps sending a message of rebellion or snobbery.

And even on a more subtle level, I would assert that there is a difference between swearing and swear substituting even when you're alone. You're all alone, you drop a glass, it shatters, and you make a linguistic choice: "Son of a gun!" you might shout-- or, if you are more linguistically rebellious, you might holler, "Son of a bitch!" As a speaker trained to recognize the difference between a "swear word" and a "non swear word," your choice of language when alone says something to yourself. It might be an almost microscopic psychological difference, but the difference is there.

So there you have it, bitches. Swearing and swear-substituting are different-- but I wouldn't say that their primary difference is a moral one. What changes the morality of a communication is the emotional/psychological impact the choice of language makes on both the speaker and the listener. But I could go on about that for another ten paragraphs, so we'll leave that discussion for another day.

Isn't it Ironic, Part II

So my friend Heidi tipped me off to the following, which suits my purpose much better than the essay below and makes me blush a little at having declared some items ironic in the last post that were not actually ironic. Irony really is something you just sense, rather than know, and all the improved situations down there are truly ironic. I love it. And you, Patrick Cassels.

Lines From Alanis Morissette's "Ironic," Modified to Actually Make them Ironic

by Patrick Cassels December 26, 2006

An old man turned ninety-eight. He won the lottery and died the next day... of chronic emphysema from inhalation of the latex particles scratched off decades' worth of lottery tickets.

A black fly in your Chardonnay... poured to celebrate the successful fumigation of your recently purchased vineyard in southern France.

A death row pardon two minutes too late... because the governor was too busy watching Dead Man Walking to grant clemency any earlier.

Rain on your wedding day... to Ra, the Egyptian sun-god.

A free ride when you've already paid... all of your money to the good-natured cab driver when you mistook him for a mugger.

The good advice that you just didn't take... after reading Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking and resolving that the key to success is making your own decisions.

Mr. Play-it-Safe was afraid to fly. He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye. He waited his whole damn life to take that flight. And as the plane crashed down, he thought, Well isn't this nice... now I'll never make it to the National Association of Aviophobics conference in Reno, NV.

A traffic jam when you're already late... to receive an award from the Municipal Planning Board for reducing the city's automobile congestion 80 percent.

A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break... at the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco corporate offices in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife... with which to kill your spouse for sleeping with the young soup chef who works at the Au Bon Pain.

Meeting the man of my dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife... who happens to be the psychiatrist I recently hired in hopes of improving my luck with the opposite sex.

Isn't it ironic?

"Well, life has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you think everything's okay and everything's going right. And life has a funny way of helping you out when you think everything's gone wrong."
- Alanis Morisette, "Ironic"

My 11th-grade Honors English teacher opened class discussion one day with a question: "What is irony?"

A blond girl sitting on the front row immediately shot her hand into the air. "It's, like, you know, rain on your wedding day," the girl said. "It's, like, you know, something not good that you didn't really expect." The teacher, in response, paused just a little too long, blinked several times, made a non-committal murmur, and called on someone else: a boy on the back row with a reputation of reading during his free time.

I write this not to be critical of my classmate: irony is a difficult thing to articulate, but rather, I would like to take this opportunity to criticize the source of the girl's confusion: the song "Ironic," by Alanis Morisette. Thanks to "Ironic," a generation of pop-culture consumers have now concluded that ironic and surprisingly unfortunate are synonyms. Given my eleventh-grade classmate's definition of irony, as based on what she had learned listening by to Jagged Little Pill on continuous repeat for weeks on end, the following things could be considered ironic: Tornadoes. Tipping over a glass of milk. A flat tire. Drive-by shootings. Saran wrap stretched over the toilet bowl. Stubbing your toe. Diarrhea.

I love Alanis. Don't get me wrong. If it weren't for the song "You Outta Know" I may not have made it alive out of a devastating breakup at age 19. I was more than a little bummed when Alanis found inner peace and happiness and stopped producing her satisfyingly angst-laden albums. But every time I hear the song "Ironic" playing on the radio, I have the urge to reach in through the speakers and give the woman a good shaking. The worst thing about "Ironic" is that some of the situations described in the song are ironic and others are not. Were she even simply consistently wrong about irony, it might be easier to cast aside the whole song as a bunch of literarily incorrect nonsense-- but because the song contains some bonafide ironic moments, listeners get all confused and start thinking it's all irony, which, as I will show below, it is not.

So let me make this clear: Rain on one's wedding day is not necessarily ironic, neither is good advice that you just didn't take, nor is a free ride when you've already paid. And because I am an excessively nerdy person, and to help clear up any 1990s-induced confusion that might still be lingering in my own mind and among the minds of you, my faithful readers, I have analyzed each situation laid out in the song and assessed it for ironic content. So, without further ado, I will lay before you the fruits of my inner strangeness.

1) An old man turned 98. He won the lottery, and died the next day. My assessment: unfortunate, but not ironic. Ironic if the old man had spent his whole life saying, "When I win the lottery, I'll do this and this and this and be happy, but until then, I'll just plug along in my own meaningless, boring cesspool of a life." And he finally won the lottery-- but by then it was too late to redeem the wasted moments, days, and years that he had passed waiting for blind luck to change his fortune.

2) Rain on your wedding day. Unfortunate, but not ironic. Unless, perhaps, you (the person getting married) are a haughty meteorologist who predicted a sunny day.

3) A free ride when you've already paid. Unfortunate. Irony might be introduced into the situation if there had been some struggle preceding the payment for a ride, a pride conflict that ended with someone finally submitting that they were wrong, there were no free rides, and laying down the payment, only to have a free ride arrive just moments later.

4) A black fly in your chardonnay. Gross. Ironic if someone has just finished lecturing about the cleanliness of the establishment at which the chardonnay was served.

5) A death row pardon two minutes too late. Ding, ding, ding! Irony.

6) Mr. Play-it-Safe was afraid to fly. He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye. He waited his whole damn life just to take this flight and as the plane crashed down, he thought, "Well, isn't this nice." This one is my favorite. Not only because the situation is ironic but also because of the verbal irony inserted at the end.

7) A traffic jam when you're already late. Frustrating, but not ironic. Unless you're the engineer who planned the traffic lights.

8) A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break. Ironic!

9) Ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife. Ironic!

10) Meeting the man of my dreams...and then meeting his beautiful wife. Oh, the irony.

So what is irony? I'll tell you: I don't know. Like romance, irony is difficult to describe and will be defined differently by different people. I could be wrong in my assessments of the irony in the above-described circumstances. But just as there are some things that are decidedly unromantic (farting), there are some things that are decidedly not ironic (rain on one's wedding day)-- and I have taken it upon myself to stop people from calling farts romantic and rain ironic.