June 24, 2010
from the comments
When I was living at home, I never once heard my parents use any swear word — or “crude language” as they called it. Oddly, this practice may have had something to do with my early sense of the secret power of words. Once when my sister was about eleven or twelve, and I was two years younger, I heard her say “shit.” Out of habit I said “Don’t say that,” and she said “Why not? Nothing happens.” I realized she was right and we both laughed, then spilled out a string of bad words that would have made a sailor blush. What a freeing moment that was. I realized that the language of transgression apparently went unnoticed by the cosmos — no earthquakes, no sudden clouds moving to cover the sun.
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