VALERIE SCHULTZ: No-cuss week tougher than it sounds
| Wednesday, Mar 10 2010 08:46 AM
Last Updated Wednesday, Mar 10 2010 08:56 PM
Valerie Schultz CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST
I have to admit that I enjoy a good cuss. I may seem like a boring, uptight, church-going mom, but I can cuss with the best of cussers. Maybe it was growing up during the freewheeling '60s, of which Country Joe and the Fish's Woodstock cheer is emblematic ("Give me an 'F' ... "). Or maybe it was the darker, locker-room side of Catholic school, as evidenced by the behavior of the Blues Brothers in their classic movie: no matter how much their former teacher (a nun they refer to as "the penguin") smacks them with a ruler and condemns their "filthy mouths and bad attitudes," they just can't stop themselves from cussing.
I remember the first time I used a four-letter word in front of my parents. I had already been away to college for a semester before I was brave enough to use the word "hell" in conversation with them. When I did, they didn't blink. Since it was one of their favorite words my whole life, peppering it into my conversation made me feel like a grown-up. Still, there were certain words that I never used in front of my parents, no matter how old I got.
Once I had children, I had to reform my speech. I had to think before I spoke; otherwise, my little darlings said things like, "What the hell is that?" When I asked my 3-year-old daughter where she had heard such a word, thinking she was going to implicate her grandparents, she used her dimpled pointer finger and said, "You, Mommy."
I once heard the legendary sports announcer Red Barber espouse a sound philosophy about the questionable habit of cussing. For many years, the host of NPR's "Morning Edition," Bob Edwards, chatted every Friday morning with Red. Red was retired by then, and their four-minute weekly conversation began with sports and then veered off into serendipitous directions. Red said that he had stopped cussing once he began his career as a radio on-air sports announcer. His wise reasoning: he figured that if he were accustomed to using salty language when he got excited, he would not be able to control the inappropriate (and illegal) words that might slip from his mouth (and onto the live broadcast) in the heat of a ball game. It seemed to me, as a parent, that the same held true in the heat of living life.
That's why I think the California Legislature's resolution proclaiming the first week of March an officially "cuss-free" week, sponsored by Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-La Canada Flintridge, was a constructive and positive move. I know that many people, some of my esteemed fellow writers included, believe that our lawmakers can make far more productive use of their time at work on the taxpayers' nickel, but I imagine that this type of resolution is the legislative equivalent of kissing babies and consuming regional foods during a campaign: it's an easy, harmless, non-controversial way to show that one has not lost touch with the regular folks. Passing the Cuss-Free Week resolution probably did not take much time away from the lawmakers' real workload. I mean, what public figure is going to spend time arguing in favor of cussing?
The young man who inspired the resolution, McKay Hatch, started the first No Cussing Club at his school in South Pasadena in 2007. McKay's website, nocussing.com (motto: Ya Wanna Hang with Us? Don't Cuss!), has since grown to 35,000 non-cussing members from around the world. In the face of an ever-coarsening society, where foul, four-letter words can be heard everywhere, from the TV to the playground to the freeway to a parent disciplining a child at the grocery store, McKay, now 16, believes in the power of a clean, or cleaned-up, mouth. Our words, he says, shape our world.
At nocussing.com, the No Cussing Challenge reads: "I won't cuss, swear, use bad language, or tell dirty jokes. Clean language is a sign of intelligence and always demands respect. I will use my language to uplift, encourage, and motivate. I will Leave People Better Than I Found Them!"
Making that pledge is harder than it sounds.
McKay sees a link between profanity and belligerent, bullying behavior. "I want to bring as much awareness as I can to people about their language and how they're speaking to each other," McKay said in an interview. "We need to stop tearing people down and uplift them instead." This is a smart kid, offering advice that could go beyond language and actually help our increasingly polarized society to act on behalf of the common good, rather than along our current destructive, partisan lines. I'm hoping our government officials took it to heart.
I understand that the No-Cuss Week resolution made some folks want to cuss out the legislators for wasting time, money, and paper. I agree that a big problem we face is that our state representatives don't seem to know what the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks they need to be doing right now to extricate California from its current fiscal disaster. Surely the situation is not helped, however, by our "filthy mouths and bad attitudes." Fortunately for me, Portantino's resolution did not include enforcement measures, because I had trouble making it cleanly through No Cussing Week. It was mentally challenging, and spiritually humbling. To McKay Hatch, I say, Thanks, kid.
These are Valerie Schultz's opinions, not necessarily those of The Californian.
