New Years Resolutions; I've got me a few.
One that I've just decided upon is trying to clean up my language here on SS Haggis. In honor of the rabbi. And also my mother. My mom grew up in total poverty, as you know, in Glasgow, but her mom never allowed her to speak like it. Scotland, being part of Britain, and being a classist society, had unwritten but concrete rules about how far life would take you if you talked with a certain kind of accent or regional dialect. So my mom was raised speaking as if she came from more a salubrious background, and passed the same on to us. Her opinion of profanity? "That is for people who have no other words by which to express themselves, and YOU, young lady, have thousands at your disposal."
So, for my mama and the rabbi, I'm going to make an effort to express myself without using F's or S's. But I most likely won't give up freakin or hell; as I always told my mom in my 5-year old lawyerly way: "I can say 'that's a bloody shame' because all of those words are in the dictionary.'" But otherwise I'll try to be good. For damn sure! ;)
1 comment:
I used to think swearing was only for people with "limited vocabularies." But that's not quite true. It's more to the effect of communicating to people with limited vocabularies. See, if you tell them that they're being crass and foolish, many a person would cock their head to the side for a moment before continuing what they were doing prior.
On the otherhand, if you yell at them to "stop being a bloody asshole, and clean your shit up", even the most base person will realize you are not pleased with their behaviour.
Curses, like music, are the anyman's language.
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