But they were wolves with linguistic standards. You can be proud of that.

This is true. Apparently, my spoken English (now sloppy as heck) used to be WAY overly formal and stilted, per people I dated. Only they said it in nice ways, but I know what they were thinking. Yesssssss.

AWEsome letter, Aims! Impressively polite and professional. You go with the no swear words and no biting.

Suzi, you've coined a perfectly cromulent new word. Most teenagers are, indeed, mon-stars!

...what, me? Swear? Surely you jest. No seriously, not aloud anymore, since my husband and son started visibly flinching in ordinary, unheated conversation. From using profanity like salt or the occasional hot pepper to season, I apparently was serving up a meal of condiments all the time. So, I'm working on mastering the plain rice diet of absent swear words, and using my vocabulary. And then I will add in judicious spikes and jots of profanity, at appropriate moments.

I'm not being graded on this, right?

using my vocabulary

Amazing what largeish words said in a calm, cold voice can do to the linguistically unarmed.

Swear words in cute foreign accents are better appreciated than the local voices. It's hard to take "fuck" seriously when it sounds like it should be on PBS

yeah, my mother and aunt went through this phase where they'd ape Irish accents when the dropped the F-bomb. All "fooking" this and "fooking" that, till my cousin and I had to point out: you DO KNOW, right, that it's still swearing even though you do it in an accent? Right? Because it seems like you're pretending like you don't know that.

But my mom swears a blue streak anyway. The first time my parents met Tom is when we were still friends and he was helping to unload a sleeper sofa that my parents brought up. Apparantly my mom started swearing about the fucking stairs and the fucking truck and the fucking this and that and sonofabitch and GODDAMNIT in conversation, and he was all, "OK, then, and you are?" (in his head, of course. in reality I think he just nodded, cringed slightly, and then ran away)

The helpful Dr. James Dobson book that someone gave us as a shower gift said, "Does your house sound like an army barracks? You have to clean up your language now that you have children."

To which my response was, predictably, "Fuck that."

As it turns out, Mal learned to swear all on his own. One of the characters in Cars says "HO-LY SHOOT!" and Mal, imitating that, realized he could combine it with another word he's heard. He now says "Ho-lee shit!" quite a lot.

We correct his pronunciation calmly, like with everything else. "It's infinity, not infenwiddy..."It's shoot not shit." To no avail.

"No, mommy, it's holy shit!"

Heh. I'm not sure if I swear a lot or not, but it did highly amuse me one time when an acquaintance was shocked, *shocked* to hear me swear. I was like "...seriously??" I think he just had this image of me as a prim and proper good girl or something. Which...what the fuck, right?

Does anyone else read Slate's Dear Prudence? I don't know what it is, but over the past few weeks, she has just really started to annoy me...

One of K-Bug's friends said she had never heard me swear which led to both K-Bug and I looking at her with our mouths hanging open in pure WTF.

DH (STBX) loves to tell a story of me making some of his sailor shipmates blush.

Does anyone else read Slate's Dear Prudence?

I sometimes get sucked in (like just now) but she comes off as so judgmental (however I liked her answer about the handcuffs).

I stopped reading her once the original Prudie was replaced by Emily Yoffe.

Yeah, I think I just don't like Emily Yoffe all that much. I've enjoyed some of her "Human Guinea Pig" stuff, but I liked the old "Dear Prudence" much better.