I seem to swear quite a lot on Twitter and in this blog. Far more than I do in real life. I interpret this as a good sign. It means I feel comfortable and relaxed enough to be spontaneously expressive.
I don’t swear for effect. I don’t swear out of laziness. I don’t swear due to possession of a limited vocabulary. I don’t swear to act the hard man. I don’t swear to appear “down with the kids” or whatever this week’s phrase meaning “down with the kids” is.
Why do I swear then?
I lived for a long time in Belfast. Swearing was just part of the dialect. More so after drink was consumed. There is a nice staccato rhythm to many swear words. Good hard consonants and not too many syllables. The accents and dialects of Greater Belfast have a certain harsh lyricism to them. An honesty. A what-you-see-is-what-you-get directness. Swearing is just part of the song, a punctuation between phrases.
This is starting to sound like an anthropology lecture or an expat waxing lyrical about The Old Country and how great it was. Fuck that fer a game o’ marlies! This post is meant to be a little light relief from the usual heavy subject matter that seems to be my forté.
People from Belfast are great at swearing. It’s a pity swearing wasn’t an Olympic sport. Belfast, Glasgow, New York, Sydney, Johannesburg, Samuel L Jackson, all competing in a swear off. Or should that be a “fuck off”? I’d watch it.
“And here we have this young Northern Irishman, competing in his first Olympics, going for an ambitious triple motherfucker with a bastard twist. Oh! And he’s carried that off beautifully. I thought he was going to stumble on the second motherfucker, but he recovered magnificently. He has really laid down the gauntlet for the favourites the Australians.”
There is a joy in swearing. My 9yo invented a new swear word so that she could swear and not get into trouble. “Bummocks!”. All the offensiveness of “bum”, all the rhythm and impact of “bollocks”. Genius! I love language of all sorts. I have as many books about language and word use as I do about graphic design and web design. Archaic language, modern language, grammar, slang, the etymology of English and other European languages. I love playing with words as much as I love creating visual imagery.
Swearing has gotten me into bother a couple of times. When my oldest daughter was still a toddler, I picked her up as usual one evening from the childminder on my way home from work. As I drove my car out onto a main road from a side road, I realised that I had misjudged the speed of an approaching car. I put my foot hard onto the accelerator pedal and exclaimed, “Fuck it!”. A little voice from the childseat in the back echoed, “Fuck it …fuck it. Fuckitfuckitfuckitfuckit …fuck …it”. She said it for three days solid. Everywhere.
I’m not keen on swearing for swearings’ sake or lazy use of language. While I find Quentin Tarantino’s films generally entertaining, the amount of swearing is artificial and quickly loses its currency, eventually detracting from the story, rather than enriching it. By the end of Reservoir Dogs I was muthafukkered out. I imagine Tarantino, when writing the script thought, “This doesn’t sound controversial enough. I’d better add three more ‘nigger’s and two more ‘motherfucker’s into the dialogue”.
What are my favourite examples of swearing?
Hugh Grant’s first words in Four Weddings And A Funeral are funny.
The Afrikaans swearing in District 9 reminds me of Johannesburg.
Mrs Doyle from Father Ted’s effin’ indignation is a classic.
Mrs Doyle & the Eff Word – click here
So what do you think of swearing? Do you have any favourite examples or do you have a swear box which has never been graced with a pound coin?
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