Profanity and shit

By many contemporary measures, I’m a bad parent. Let me illustrate with a playground moment from when my son was two. 

We lived in Oakland, California, during my kids’ early years, in a neighborhood just south of upscale Rockridge. From our house, we could walk 15 minutes to a redwood-shaded playground where the majority of the Rockridge parents there, almost all moms, arrived dressed for the gym or the yoga studio. I don’t mention this as a judgment on them, but rather to say that I, an unshaven six-foot-four man who probably hadn’t bathed in a few days and certainly hadn’t practiced yoga, felt quite out of place.

On the day in question, my son scrambled around the sprawling playground structure among the trees, and he eventually climbed to the very top of the dome, where he perched in a sort of crow’s nest and sat stirring a dirt-filled pie dish with a wooden spoon. He pretended to try a bite. “Hey Papa!” he shouted across the playground, loudly enough to snag the attention of the gang of moms. “This pie is gonna be fucking yummy!”

I laughed reflexively and flashed him a thumbs-up. I couldn’t help it. Sure, I was probably alone in my amusement. I imagine the other parents didn’t want their kids strolling home trying out their new word-of-the-day, and I definitely felt a number of glares burning in my direction. Fair enough. But my boy was too far away for me to deliver instruction on playground etiquette and the appropriate use of language without doing so in a performative way. And I’ve never had much interest in performative parenting.

The awful truth is, I don’t care if my kids swear. I myself love bad words; I admire their power and humor. I understand that many readers here will disagree, and that’s completely fine. But me? I don’t give a good goddamn if my kids pop off with some profanities in the comfort of their own home.

That’s not to say, of course, that I taught my kid to announce that his make-believe pie promised to be fucking yummy, nor do my wife and I especially encourage the use of blue language, but we also don’t instill in our kids the notion that run-of-the-mill profanity is inherently taboo, or that their mouths might be washed out with soap. (I distinctly remember receiving that threat when I was a kid, but mainly for talking back.)

Our six-year-old daughter has a particular affinity for wordplay and rhymes. The other day she said, “Hey Mom, I think I need to blast some ass. And when I say ass, I mean poop.” Who could punish such adorableness?

Of course there are limits to what we allow: Some words are just plain hateful (more on that below). We also make sure our kids know that it isn’t acceptable to hurl F-bombs in school or at a friend’s house or in the wrong settings—including playgrounds—but for the most part, if they use salty language at home, and they use it well, we don’t mind. 

Before I explain why, a short, anonymous poll:

Q: How do you deal with your kids and bad words? (Click your answer in the box below.)

1. I strictly forbid curse words and never swear in front of my kids.

2. I rarely swear in front of them, only by accident, then apologize and firmly instruct them that bad words are not to be uttered.

3. I swear in front of them but don’t allow them to join in the fun, explaining that swearing is an adult privilege.

4. I swear like a motherfucker but mostly ignore it when they do, hoping that if I don’t give it any attention, they’ll quit.

5. I don’t give a fuck! Let it rip.

It’s impossible to write any sort of ode to profanity without evoking two of our great philosophers, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. 

Lenny was a free-speech advocate as much as he was a comedian. Toward the end of his career and until his overdose death in 1966, he may have spent more time in handcuffs than he did on stage, frequently arrested for obscenity and blacklisted by most clubs. One of many classic lines that got him in trouble: “Take away the right to say fuck, and you take away the right to say fuck the government.” Lenny had a lot of reasons to say fuck the government.

A 25-year-old George Carlin was in attendance one night in Chicago in 1962 when Lenny Bruce was arrested onstage. It’s worth clicking this link to hear Carlin, who was just getting his start as a comedian, describe that night’s police raid and his own arrest for disobeying the cops. When he was tossed into the paddy wagon alongside his hero, Lenny asked him what he was in for. George said, “Ah, I didn’t give them my I.D.” Lenny replied with, “Don’t be a schmuck.” 

But a decade later, George Carlin would get arrested for non-schmucky reasons when he performed the bit for which he would be best remembered, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”—a list originally comprised of shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits, though it evolved over time. Here are the best 10 minutes of the routine.

My favorite linguist,

John McWhorter

, describes the three main historical eras of profanity in his fun and excellent little book, Nine Nasty Words. The first era of dirty words was religious in nature: damn, hell, and the like. The worst thing one could do back then was blaspheme our delicate Christian sensibilities. The next wave of obscenities—plug your ears and cover your privates—was based on the human body: shit, ass, fuck, etc. The third and most recent era of nasty words is focused on slandering groups of people—such as slurs aimed at race and sexual orientation. See how we’ve evolved?

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Lenny Bruce had a famous bit in which he battered the crowd with every racial slur imaginable, over and over again, auctioneer-style. He performed it with the house lights up, pointing to people in the audience and leveling those unutterable terms at them. Then he said, “Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.” Carlin said something similar years later: “These words have no power. We give them this power by refusing to be free and easy with them. We give them great power over us. They really, in themselves, have no power.”

This sentiment, I have to say—even as a parent who runs pretty loose with rules—is a lot of bullshit. I respect it intellectually but disagree with it in reality. Words have enormous power, which George Carlin and Lenny Bruce surely understood and believed, and as the criminal charges against them demonstrated. Lenny Bruce finished that bit by asking the audience to imagine if President Kennedy would go on TV and repeat the n-word so many times that finally it “didn't mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a n— at school.”

A world without hate is a nice dream, and I know that’s what Lenny Bruce aimed to conjure with the bit, but that’s not our world. It brings to mind an interview I recently read with the artist and teacher Latoya Lovely; she related this story in The Creators Forum about an encounter at school not long after the civil rights protests of 2020, sparked by the killing of George Floyd:

One of the kindergarten classes I was in, a little brown boy in a school that was mostly white was arguing with a couple of his classmates. And I just came over to listen, to just be a safe adult. I let them continue to argue so that I could see what they were talking about. The little boy was like, “They’re telling me that I’m lying because I’m telling them that a cop killed a man.” And the little kids were like, “Well, my parents have never told me that.” And I almost cried because I’m thinking in my head, it’s probably because you’re white. And this little brown boy cannot live in this world the way that you do. And his parents are talking to him just like I talk to my son. But it’s not fair that he carries that burden and that these poor babies are calling him a liar because they’ve never heard anything so wild in their life. It is our responsibility—white folks, everybody—in some manner, in the best way that you can to tell your children the damn truth. That’s how our world is going to change. 

Latoya Lovely and Lenny Bruce want the same thing, but Latoya has lived the experience of a Black person in America in the modern day and is bringing up a son in this country. While Lenny’s bit intends to shock us and make us think, Latoya offers a real way forward, one that is both simple and difficult: Tell your children the damn truth.

I know it might seem that we’ve strayed from our discussion of children and swearing, but I believe it’s all related. I respect my kids enough to give them access to the full and powerful range of our language, to trust that they’ll understand the boundaries and the ways that language can be deployed for good and for evil. I want them to be able to distinguish between the truly hateful words of McWhorter’s third category—slurs against groups of people, which only intend to inflict pain on others—and silly PG cusses like shit or ass. And along the way, I try, each day, to tell my kids the damn truth.

* Apologies to John McWhorter for the title of this post, which I stole directly from a chapter title of Nine Nasty Words.