I didn’t start to cuss until I got out of high school. You won’t believe this either, but I didn’t ever drink any alcohol. Not even a beer. Nor ever, ever even consider smoking a cigarette or any other smokable thing. I was a nerd, or a dork, or not “neat,” nor “groovy,” nor “hep” enough, just not in the In-crowd enough for anybody to bother to clue me into what everybody else was doing on the weekends, even though my secret dream was to be a beatnik. Nope, I sure didn’t cuss, and I had never even heard anybody in my entire family drop an F-bomb. Ever.
Cussing got popular in the sixties, and hey, I jumped right in (with Catholic guilt tagged onto every expletive) (at the start—I had to work at it). We were reconstructing the zeitgeist, you may remember, so it was F-bomb here and F-bomb there and it felt very free and madcap, and we were just a bunch of carefree, cussing hippies experimenting our way to making the world fit to live in. Actually, I wasn’t even a very good hippie, but I certainly was poor and had long hair and rode a motorcycle (on the back) across the country, careened all over the world for a couple of years, lived on a Kibbutz, did all the things, and then joined the migration to Mendocino that changed the structure of things around here quite a bit. You may remember.
We landed here and planted gardens and birthed babies at home, started communes and figured out how to govern by consensus, and we pretty much all cussed a lot until it sort of sounded like regular conversation.
It’s funny about upbringing, though. I’ve probably cussed more than you, in truth, but nowadays I’m hearing nonstop cussing coming out of my iPhone and computer, out of podcasts, TikTok, and Substack posts, and thickly out of every movie, and grossly and loudly out of the tender mouths of the callow youths who walk by my house on their way to middle school, and most particularly, out of the mouths of people who are elected to be the august leaders of this entire nation. I have to say, it’s quite shocking (she said, primly)! Yes, even to a cussing veteran of the sixties and seventies, all this random profanity just doesn’t sit right.
I’m old enough to remember journalists like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow and presidents Ike Eisenhower and the many and varied presidents who’ve come after him…They probably cussed sometimes in the presence of their closest cohorts (I know Nixon and Johnson famously did, when not on a hot mic, and Abe Lincoln said “damn” once), but never, ever did you see them swan onstage and get behind the podium and start dropping off-color parts of speech in public. There was this old-fashioned thing called decorum that kept them in line. Also known as manners. Cussing was déclassé and they were able to make their points without it. It was more couth that way.
So, I’ve decided to quit cussing. It’s unseemly. And it makes you look stupid, like you’re incapable of digging up another descriptor that does the job better and more elegantly, and even more forcefully than an F-bomb present participle. Of course, this means I’ll have to dig around in my brain, because the F-bomb has rightfully been plugged as the all-purpose, one-syllable noun-pronoun-verb-adverb-adjective-conjunction—and especially—Interjection. Yes, it’s close at hand and very handy, plus it still does have shock value (for some sensitively attuned people I could mention), but if you leave it out of the discourse, what will happen? I think I know: the conversation is elevated at the same time it is deepened, because there is always another word that can be substituted that can be more suitable, if not highfalutin.
I think I’ll start a campaign: I’m going to put fifty cents into a jar every time I fail to keep my own promise. I’m going to fine my grandkids, too, if they ever say a bad word in front of me, even though they will think I’m a fuddy-duddy. Let them! Grammas are expected to be fuddy—and duddy, too. I will send a persuasively worded letter to Hollywood movie studio heads and to Network TV station heads, and to the various social media moguls, as well, suggesting they have a cuss-no-more kitty, too. And I’m going to send that same letter to the Senate, Congress, and the Oval Office and request that our leaders and potty-mouthed influencers be fined fifty cents every time they cuss during a public appearance. All fines will be collected quarterly and sent to the US Treasury, c/o The Anti-Cussing Development Strategy League. By this means, at fifty cents a whack, we will perhaps put a sizable dent in the national debt.
Here are some cuss word replacements to start you off:
• Egregious: atrocious, deplorable, extreme, flagrant, glaring, grievous, heinous, infamous, intolerable, nefarious, notorious, scandalous, shocking
• Bumptious: arrogant, brash, cavalier, cocky, conceited, egotistical, forward, full of oneself, haughty, loud, obnoxious, overconfident, overweening, pompous, pushy, self-assertive, self-important, smug, swaggering, uppity, vain, uncouth
• Absurd: crazy, farcical, foolish, idiotic, illogical, inane, incongruous, irrational, ludicrous, nonsensical, preposterous, senseless, silly, stupid, unreasonable
• Dastardly: base, contemptible, cowardly, craven, despicable, low, mean, sneaky, treacherous, underhanded, vile, wicked
• Meritless: worthless, unworthy, disgusting, dishonorable, scandalous, sordid, lame, odious, unbecoming
• Lawless: criminal, anarchical, rebellious, anarchic, illegal, disorderly, illicit, unruly
• Stupid: witless, dumb, slow, thick, idiotic, foolish, dull, ignorant, moronic, troglodyte
See what I mean? SO many words!! It’s fun to make a game of thinking up synonyms at the dinner table with the kids! Show them how to flatten opponents on the debate team by making a scathing string of adjectives and adverbs, just by adding “ly”: Ludicrously, criminally moronic, for instance. Contemptibly, cravenly, sordidly dishonorable. OK, call me the grammar police, I don’t mind. You will thank me eventually, I bet, for helping to clean up podcasts on Substack, high-echelon political interviews, and backyard BBQ parties; for paving the way to getting your point across in a more erudite way; certainly, for reducing our thirty-seven trillion-dollar national debt, of course; and for fortifying family relations and vocabularies. Words are where it’s at, sister. Really.
