Sacha Molitorisz writes a blog for the Sydney Morning Herald called Who’s Your Daddy. He’s a witty bastard, much in the same vein as another daddy blogger I admire, Mike over at Cry It Out. One of his more recent posts was Swear to be Different, in which he discussed swearing around children, children swearing and language generally and it got me reflecting on our own occasionally bad-ass language around Tiggy. Mofo.
I have to agree with Sacha. Swearing is a perfectly valid and legitimate linguistic and social strategy (in English, as it is in many other languages). I mean, what else rates when you want to express just how frustrated, pained and aggrieved you are that a jagged piece of broken glass happened to be right underneath that part of your bare, descending foot at the beach that is only lately healing from a boil? And in English, we have such a rich legacy of grunting, guttural, Dutch-Teutonic one syllable grenades from which to choose. Some of which are extraordinarily linguistically versatile, I might add.
That said, dropping a few f-bombs into conversation in the wrong company can get you quickly ostracised… and never invited back. It’s all a question of context: mostly the tiresome and exhausting context of the conservative middle-class, who all manner of people have observed attempting to imitate an imagined set of high-class manners. If only they manage to mimic and police these perceived high-cultural forms — the rationale goes — they’ll get there too one day. But at the other ends of the social spectrum, filthy verbiage flings hard. It’s dockworkers and merchant wankers that swear as much as each other, particularly in Australia, the land where swearing almost became a currency and someone’s social wealth is regularly assessed in this shadow linguistic economy. Certain occupations invite more ‘bad language’, as do certain concentrations of gender and age. So it’s a matter of knowing when it’s appropriate, and when it’s not. Try acquiring social capital in the army, or a trade, if you’re a bloke and you request a beer with a ‘please may I have one of your beverages’.
But that doesn’t help children, who are only learning social rules and prohibitions, and have as much trouble regulating themselves as recognising limits in other people.
Tiggy is a fast learner of language, and has already dropped a couple of f-bombs on me. One was perfectly contextually appropriate, as I swore at Spindle, one of our cats. Spindle had a skink in her mouth that she had captured outside, and was running across our table with it. I called Spindle a ‘bloody bastard’, to which Tiggy added an excited ‘Fuck!’. I was shocked, a little concerned, but perhaps secretly a little pleased too. Most importantly, I didn’t comment so as not to endorse the exclamation with any particular value (negative or positive), but noted that she had recognised that the word she’d deployed fell into a class of imprecations for being cross with. And used it as it should be used. She was maybe 18 months old.
The next f-bomb was a humdinger, exploding at bedtime. I was trying to settle her in the gloaming semi-dark of our bedroom, in her own bed, sans hammock. She was perkier than a raver drinking Red Bull, and kept tossing and turning. Eventually, she sat up with the blanket around her waist, threw an accusatory pointing finger in my face and exclaimed ‘Daddy. I don’t want to go to bed. You’re fugged!’. With the exception of the greatly endearing exchange of the homophonic ‘ck’ and ‘g’, it was searingly perfect. Again, I didn’t react so as to deny the utterance a social value.
Like Sacha, I could bend the truth more than a little and say that it’s the fault of my wife — whose ability to swear, and swear creatively, could burn the hairs off a wharfie’s balls and has long gained her kudos in male-dominated company (and in the male-dominated IT industry). But like Sacha, she’d just call me a fucking liar. And she’d be right. I swear too.
So long as we can impart to her compassionate respect for other people, and a keen appreciation for the contextual appropriateness of swearing, I’ll be happy if she follows her mother (and her father) into the wharfie’s hall of fame.
Maybe she could wait until she’s closer to being a teenager, though. She might invoke cardiac arrests in old people if she does it while she’s still a dimpled pixie of a toddler.
