Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Ack. Well, I'm a dummy. I ordered Timeless, and it will be delivered tomorrow. To my office. Which is closed. Bah.
I thought I changed my Amazon preferences so that my home address was my default, but -- obviously not. I must have just ordered it really quickly and didn't even look at the address field.
At least I didn't send it to my brother.
I said, "Jesus, Joseph and Mary!" in a meeting with my boss, who made a crack about being raised Catholic. Which he is, too.
At least I didn't say, "Shit, piss, and corruption!", which used to be one of my mother's more outrageous swears.
"Shit, piss, and corruption!",
Oh man, I like that one.
I was saying "Tartar sauce!" for a while, when the kids were little. It's surprisingly satisfying.
My dad says "damnation!" and "I swanny." For real, no sense of irony, "I swanny." Or is it "swannee?"
My parents used to just not swear around us, until traffic just got too much when I was about 14 or so. One branch of our family (one of the crazy ones) swore liberally around their kids, but only in Patois, so at least when the kid went to school (in the upper class white Detroit suburb where they lived) no one had any idea what she was on about.
Way to go to not put your heart into it.
My mother used to use 'Ayatollah Khomenei' as a swear.
My father was fond of "What the hell are you doing, shit-for-brains," which came back to bite him in the ass when my two year old brother said it to him one day.
"I swanny."
I was just thinking of this earlier. It really takes a swear-averse culture to use a euphemism for "I swear."
In the last 10 years, my mother has started saying "bitch" tentatively, when the person being described is one. I've never heard her swear. She slams things instead.
My mom says "Oh, ick," which is a very 1940's teenager way to not-swear.
A few weeks ago when my family and I were locked out of my parent's van after dinner, Mom yelled "SHIT!" in front of the restaurant entrance, which is absolutely hilarious considering how much of a goody two-shoes she is. Much of my own annoyance at the situation disappeared as a result.
When I told my mom I had a boyfriend (after almost a decade of being a total lezzie, as far as she knew), she exclaimed, "holy SHIT!!" Which sent my sister and me into gales of laughter, and then she chided herself for cursing on the Sabbath, which just made us laugh more.