I try to avoid making new year’s resolutions. I just can’t cope with instituting major changes on the very first day of the year. Nothing bites harder than waking up with a malignant hangover on January 1 and realizing that 1) I can’t indulge in a little hair-of-
the-dog because I resolved to drink less, or to drink only on weekends, or to drink only when the moon enters its luteal phase, or whatever; 2) I can’t go out to a comfortingly greasy brunch because I have to start my Neofascist Grapefruit And Extra-Virgin Olive Oil Diet immediately; and 3) I can’t substitute smoking for eating my head off because I vowed to swear off the old devil weed. So I don’t make resolutions, by and large, because history has proved time and time again that I can’t keep them, so I don’t see much point.

This year, though, I have one resolution. I will try to swear less. I decided to make this resolution the other day while taking clothes out of the dryer, because a pair of tights had wound itself around a dozen other items and tangled everything up hopelessly, and I stuck my head into the dryer and yanked at the offending hosiery and snarled at it, “Come on, you fucking fuck-fuck,” and as the word “fuck” reverberated around my head about seventy-five times in the echo chamber of the dryer, it dawned on me that perhaps I should cut back on the curse words.

I use so much profanity now that it has totally lost any power it might once have had. I don’t really know how this happened, exactly, but family history gives us a rough idea of when things started to go downhill – allegedly, one day at nursery school, I announced that “at my house, we say ëgoddammit!’” Family history does not tell us how my mother wriggled out of that one when confronted with this by my teacher, but apparently Mom let that one slip when she thought I couldn’t hear her or something, because for years my parents would never let us say anything closer to a PG rating than “what the heck” or “oh my gosh.” We couldn’t say “jeez” because it came too close to “Jesus Christ,” and we couldn’t say “oh my God.” We couldn’t say “piffle” because our mother thought it skated a little too close to the thin ice of “piss.” We couldn’t say “fart.” We couldn’t even say “butt.” Naturally, around our friends, we did not honor these rules, but in front of our parents, my brother and I sounded like refugees from Mayberry with all the golly-goshing and gee-willikering. We also circumvented the ban on certain words by spelling them (“If you go in my room again, I’m gonna K-I-C-K your B-U-T-T!”) or by giving each other the “reverse” finger (all fingers up except the middle one). Little by little, my parents stopped caring if we swore in front of them, acknowledging at last that their strict no-blasphemy policy didn’t really jibe with the constant armpit-farting and belch-ripping taking place at the dinner table on a nightly basis.

Exciting though I found this liberation at first, I have since realized that it has a down side. Most of the time, I sound like the NC-17 cut of a Tarantino flick, raving on about goddamn pieces of shit and stupid-ass dickheads whenever I get a hangnail or have to wait in line for longer than 12 seconds, so if something really serious or annoying or painful happens to me, I can’t kick the expletives up a notch to reflect that. In other words, if I already use the word “motherfucker” when I break a glass in the sink, what do I have left if I get shot or something?

So, I’ve made a command decision to turn down the fishwife dial to 1 or 2 instead of leaving it set to 10 all the time. This means that I’ll have to use a bunch of silly G-rated epithets like “oh fudge” and “Jupiter Christmas” and “blimey” and “what the Sam Hill” all the time. Can someone with three tattoos go around declaiming “what a bunch of malarkey!” with any sort of credibility? No, not really. Can you picture me muttering, “Tarnation!” No, neither can I. And my backlist of epithets will suffer the most, not least since I will have to replace my insult default setting, “butthole,” with a more family-friendly designation along the lines of “nerd.” In other words, my everyday speech will turn into a basic-cable broadcast of The Breakfast Club when Judd Nelson’s character launches into his big monologue about his abusive father, and the cigar burns, and the carton of smokes his father gets him for Christmas, and he imitates himself and his father screaming at each other, and at the end of the speech, as the others look on in horror, he shouts, nostrils flared, “What about you, Dad? FUCK YOU!” and the guitars on the soundtrack echo him screaming, except that on basic cable, he either says, “What about you, Dad? FLIP YOU!” or “What about you, Dad? FORGET YOU!” and never mind the fact that they used John Denver’s voice on the overdub so that it sounds even more edited and fake, but having the dad say “FLIP YOU” pretty much defeats the purpose of the scene, and similarly I, who have a reputation for longshoreman-flavored irascibility to uphold, must resort to croaking “my stars” or “a pox upon ye” through gritted teeth whenever I bang my elbow really hard. Sweet fancy Moses, I don’t know if I can do this.

I have tried to do this before, and I would not exactly call the experiment an unqualified success. About five years ago, my best friend and I realized that we cursed almost constantly; one day, Ernie said, “Shit, man, we curse a lot,” and I said, “Yeah, we curse way too fucking much,” and she said, “Why the fuck do we do that?” and I said, “Beats the shit out of me,” and we decided to go a whole day without cursing. For the first few hours, we sounded like this: “I can’t find my fuhhhh.” “I hate that gahhhh.” “Can we move some of this shhhhh?” “Oh, dahhhh. Behhhh.” We literally could not get through more than four or five words before coming up short where a swear word used to be and suffering a mid-sentence meltdown; our friends stared at us while we struggled to make ourselves understood. Then we adopted a different strategy, inserting nonsense syllables in order to keep things moving, but we sounded like Tolkien characters on Percocet: “Hey, snorf. Could you pass me that blembly thing?” “Tell that schmap to threck off!” “I have to read the rest of this quonking fraw.” “Drizzzz!” By dinnertime, we had shifted into archaic mode, grumbling “dadnabbit” and “fie, blackguard!” at people on line ahead of us in the dining hall, and shortly after that, one of us finally snapped and screamed “FUCK THIS FUCKING CRAP!” and we gave up.

I don’t have the best track record in this department, clearly, but I think I can do a better job this time. First of all, I refuse to stop saying “bee-otch,” which should help. Second of all, the numerous uses of the word “not” never cease to amaze and delight. Third of all, I have recently rediscovered several agreeably dismissive slurs from my youth. A few weeks ago, Ace busted out “twerp,” and I’ve used it ever since; plus, my use of “twerp” inspired the Biscuit to add “runt” to my list. I forget who resurrected “pantywaist,” but I like that one, as well as the obscure eighth-grade term “spazmatoid.” Let’s not forget “nerd,” “dweeb,” “geek,” and “dork,” which have slightly different meanings but which get the job done in a pinch. And fourth of all, God invented the thesaurus for a reason. If anyone can find a synonym for “dicksmack,” I can.

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