Inside Darren

I distinctly remember, in grade 6, deciding one day that “I really have to clean up my language”.

It may sound strange to adult ears, but elementary school children (especially boys) swear like sailors, because it’s one of the only ways they can safely rebel, and still hide it with relative ease.

As a pious 11 year old, I made a commitment to de-filthify my speech patterns, and stuck to that commitment, surprisingly, until I was mid-way through a religious studies degree. Somewhere in the midst of the Christian subculture, I thought to myself “Does God really care about whether or not I say crap or shit? I mean, aren’t there far worse dangers to the state of my soul than four letter words? Like pornography and dancing?”

But today, as I was contemplating my increasing involvement in the blogging community, I was forced to deal with the issue of swearing, and if I want to be using it on a website that my parents could possibly be reading, and, (I write with bowel-twisting anxiety) my girlfriend’s parents could possibly be reading.

By the way, if you are Larissa’s parents, and are reading this, I want to point out that I used the s-word in quotation above, which I believe is acceptable. (”Yeah Darren, but you were quoting yourself!” “SHUT UP! We were home free!”) Sorry, had to have a word with my inner-monologue there.

Anyway, I have yet to reach an adequate resolution between the possibilities of using entertaining and intellectually-responsible swearing, or avoiding all possibilities of my being written out of the will by my family (or potential family) altogether.

What I did think about was this: Words are given a special power when we decide not to say them, and to use some other word or phrase in its place. Consider Harry Potter referring to Voldemort as “You-know-who”. In this same line of thought, the Jewish people have always considered God’s name too sacred to be said out loud, and therefore, when they are reading scripture and God’s name appears, they say “Adoni” (which means “Lord”) in it’s place. The name of God, therefore, attains a certain power in speech. [I just realized that I used “Harry Potter” and “God” to illustrate the same point. That’s GOTTA earn me some extra purgatory time.]

Now consider modern North America. What are the two words which are still major no-no’s for network TV (our most popular medium of cultural communication)? The big F, and the big S. Words like “damn”, “ass”, and “hell” are fairly common now, and phrases like “Oh my Gawd” are frequent. The two words that we hand over the most “unspoken power” to are words that refer to sex and excrement, respectively.

What does that say about what we worship? Is it any wonder why North American culture can seem so “effed up”?