My mom says "damn" and, rarely, "shit." Never when I was a kid. The only time I have ever said "fuck" in front of my mom was around age 17 when I dropped something as I was trying to get out the door. The look on her face was so utterly terrifying that I fell over myself apologizing before I escaped.

Too bad my good upbringing didn't fucking take.

I remember being shocked the first time I heard Mom say fuck but now she says it all the time.

"Alex" was a killer, GC. Her dad being a sportswriter and still being so...tender and everything broke me in bits. Alex was only a bit older than I and I thought we would have liked each other, too. If she lived, I mean.

Funny swearing story:

When I was 3, I walked into the kitchen and asked my mom what we were having for dinner. She said "blah, blah, blah and beets" I said " I don't want any yucky fucking beets" She said, calmly "What did you say?" I repeated "I don't want any yucky fucking beets" She said "oh, you can't say that word, it's a bad word" I said "yucky?" She tried not to smile and said "no, the other one" Story still told with great amusement (often by me)

I asked Mom about fuck. She says:

good question................I remember thinking it was a horrid word...........I remember seeing "so and so eats it raw" one time when I was a child and going home and asking about it and not getting a satisfactory answer............what could be rougher than that, eh? I think it was something I picked up as "usable" in semi-polite company much later in life, prolly around your college age.

If I heard the word "fuck" before college, it registered as white noise to me, because I had no frame of reference. Yes, I was very insulated from the world.

Also, my mother lost it when anyone said "my god", so you can guess the tolerance level of swearing.

I said: "I remember the eats it raw story."

Mom says: "and that begs the question: How could you cook it?"

GC, yes, it broke me hard. And erika, yeah, her dad being Frank DeFord, Sports Guy, just wrecked me. I still flinch away from stuff with his byline because the sheer mundane sportsness of it just crashes hard in my brain into what I know his family suffered all those years ago.

Though CF is one of those diseases where it's mindboggling how much has been done in terms of treatment and increasing life expectancy and quality of life just in the past decade. (Which just makes me sad for the DeFords all over again, thinking that if Alex had been born anytime from about 1990 on she'd very likely still be alive, and it would be more of a real, normal kid's life--CF still sucks hard and it's still fatal, but it's so different now than it was when she was born).

Also, my mother lost it when anyone said "my god",

Yeah, my sister got the soapy mouth treatment for saying "GEEZ" because clearly taking the lord's name in vane and all. Who knew?

it's a Bad Idea to call people words when you don't know what they mean.

Yeah, I got busted making the transition to England when a teacher saw me tell another student to bugger off. In fact, I wrote a program to tell her to bugger off continuously.

There's a kid from hell at the krav centre who when complimented on his use of the word...I think he used "precariously" right at age 4 said in reply "It is a good word. 'Fuck' is a bad word."

You know the family I'm talking about, Kristin--the sister's first word was fuck, as Pollyannaish as she might appear today.