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.

My friend A's girlfriend died of CF last year at age 24. They have come a long way, but it's still such a tragic illness.

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

I remember being in 8th-grade homeroom and feeling daring because I used the word "shit" with my friends (not when the teacher could hear, of course). Swearing with the peers was definitely okay with us, but I had to be careful not to let it get out of hand, not just because my parents would not have liked it, but also because I was babysitting a lot and had to be careful what I said around the kids. So, I learned restraint pretty early on.

I still like to let loose with a well-placed f-bomb now and then, however!

amych suggested I repost this here for Stephanie:

Have any of our lawyers or librarians or others done immigration work?

If I have an Alien registration number for an individual (A #xxxxxxxxx) and a number that starts Fin #xxxxxxxx, do you know what the Fin # is, and do you know if there is any way to look up what happened in a particilar case if I have those two numbers and a name?

So I have made a decision. My sweet dad sent me a couple hundred dollars to help out with the expenses of the last few weeks, and I had planned to put it all directly back onto the credit card. But my back and neck are killing me, and my stress level is really high, and I haven't had a massage in more than a year. So I'm spending $60 on an hour massage this afternoon, and I have decided not to feel guilty about it.