It’s not cussing if you’re quoting

Caution: Contains f-bombs and depiction of creative parenting

Hang around my mom’s family for half an hour, and eventually you’ll hear about the crazy things all of us – aunts, uncles, cousins, moms and dads – have done in extremis. To escape punishment or satisfy curiosity or alleviate boredom or, sometimes, all of the above at once. A handful of stories have been repeated often enough that they’ve become legends. A well-attended family gathering can resemble a Greek banquet at which bards chanted tales about the rage of Achilles or Odysseus’ escape from the cyclops.

With us, there’s a particularly well-known story about Mom and Uncle Dav lowering Uncle Bo over a cliff by a rope, so he could get a close-up look at a bobcat cave. There’s one about a brother of mine escaping up a maple tree for a few hours so Grandma couldn’t reach him with the switch. There are bb guns and brothers used for target practice, teenage drivers and (multiple) fender-benders, young boys with the lingerie section of the Sears catalog.

There’s also a much-loved subset of stories about cussing. For example, there’s the time when Grandma called my brothers and me “little bullshits” then got cracked up about it. There’s a cousin whose first words, at around age four, were spoken in heavy traffic: “call him a sonofabitch, dad.” Or the uncle who calls and, instead of saying hello, starts conversations with “what the hell’s going on?”

So you can imagine how I, born into a family where stories about cussing are highly amusing, would have to try it out for myself.

It began mildly. Once when I was six or so, I test-drove a word I’d probably gotten from my dad. Mom heard it and gasped like a bee had stung her. (Note: My mother is sort of a standard bearer for good behavior. She’s the one, Aunt Liz says, who’ll be sitting in the corner reading Psalms while everyone else is running wild. )

When Dad asked her why she had gasped, she was, due to shock and moral outrage, temporarily unable to communicate. She pursed her lips and shook her head and eventually was able to utter, “She said ‘shoot’ with an ‘i‘.”

To fix me, she tried a form of aversion therapy she could only have picked up from A Clockwork Orange. She set the kitchen timer and had me stand in front of the stove and say “shit” over and over again for a full five minutes. After the first minute or so, I began to try a variety of inflections. By minute four, I was nearly singing.

Perhaps she had not watched A Clockwork Orange carefully. In the movie, aversion therapy was accompanied by social isolation and drugs that induced crippling nausea and lasted a whole lot longer than five minutes. Alas, the most lasting effect my mother’s therapy had on me was to make me bored with small-time words like “shit.”

So I moved on. Secretly, of course, so as not to offend – or incur creative punishment from – my mother. A few years and a new school later, I was only saying “d” and “a” around my brothers, and saving f-bombs for walks through the woods with my best friend. She would laugh so hard when I dropped one I figured the pine needles were more likely to tell on me than she was. I had gotten quite adept at f-ing this and f-ing that.

Then, near the end of fourth grade, to the relief, no doubt, of the pine needles, I found Jesus. Except in moments of extreme frustration, my foul language was severely (some would say blessedly) curtailed. When I did slip up, I felt properly guilty about it. Generally, if I felt a slip coming, I lowered my voice to a whisper so as not to cause anyone else to stumble. It went so well that I got a reputation for being squeaky clean that lasted all the way through high school, to the point that, when I said “shit” once, it was immortalized by friends signing my yearbook as the time I “fell off the pedestal.”

Years later, after Bible college and a stint as a missionary, when I was in graduate school in Seattle, the pendulum swung back the other way. It would take a merry band of documentarians to detail all the things that went wrong for me in those years, so, for now, let me just list a few stresses affecting this particular moment: a research university on the quick-turnaround quarter system, two seminar papers due, springtime pollen, daily rain, an ex-fiance still palling around with my roommates, general lack of money and groceries, a sinus infection, and a bus ride home from the emergency room. Plus a stack of 22 essays I had promised to return, graded with comments, the following day.

As many have done before me, I had phoned my mother in tears. I tried to explain between gasps and sobs all the things that were weighing on me, but somehow the conversation got stuck on how to grade those 22 essays. Mom, pragmatic and good-intentioned, was full of advice about how to manage my time and keep my promise to my students.

But she was clearly missing the larger, sadder point, and that only increased my distress. I wasn’t being lowered over a cliff or scampering up a maple tree – but this was my moment in extremis. This was a time to lash out at the universe with something drastic. So I did.

“Mom,” I said, “fuck the papers! Just … fuck the papers.”

She got very quiet. For the tiniest of moments, I felt the balance of the universe shift. I had just dropped an f-bomb on my mother and was still alive. I had tempted both fate and maternal compassion, and now all I could do was hold my breath, waiting for her reaction.

“Well, that’s interesting,” she began. I winced. It was going to get ugly. “Flock the papers,” she said. “I’ve never heard that one. What does it mean?”

Clearly, I had miscalculated. I had overshot the behaving-badly-to-get-mother’s-attention tone I was aiming for and managed instead to broadcast on a frequency completely out of her range. She hadn’t even heard the cuss word.

Thinking back now, I realize how well Mom’s reaction fits into the rest of the family attitude toward foul language. We flirt with small-time “shits” and “damns,” but the f-word is completely absent – from large gatherings, anyway. The lightweight words, on the other hand, aren’t so very far from where we want to be as good people, but still they let us live a bit dangerously.

Maybe that’s why it’s more fun to tell stories about other people cussing than to drop the words ourselves into conversation. Perhaps it’s the borrowed tension between expected good behavior and surprise transgression that makes the stories funny.

The fact that the two halves, the good one and the evil one, can stay completely separate reminds me of something Mom told my brothers and me once. We had caught her singing along to a song that had “damn” in it, and we gasped simultaneously in both shock and hope for our linguistic future. “It’s not cussing if you’re quoting,” she said quickly, probably out of sheer self-defense. She tried to take it back later, when we found our own songs to sing along to, but it was too late. We had already begun to digest the implications.

More recently, when I was considering more graduate school and talked to my mother about how much I wanted to avoid repeating the situation in Seattle, I did use the words “cluster fuck.” Having learned my lesson, though, I was canny enough to put the offending words in air quotes. Sure enough, Mom laughed.