First Curse

By no means is this a confessional blog. Nor is it a diary in any conventional sense, but more a collection of ruminations, comment, anecdote and sheer, as the French would say, 'Quois?'. Yet, I've noticed in blogs of those other genres that while you sometimes find almost unhealthy levels of intimacy, you never come across the one rite of passage that secures entry into a far richer world. Yes, I'm talking about swearing. That delicious, satisfying, almost primal use of language that in one vivid utterance gives healthy vent to anger, relieves stress and pours soothing balm on pain. Without it, how could we express outrage so succinctly, or be so fully, extraordinarily human? Ignorant people (including but not limited to: the US Federal Communications Commission, OFCOM & the writers of the books of Genesis and Leviticus) all fail to grasp the profound nature of swearing, perceiving it within narrowly moralistic and literal confines. Yet the science behind swearing reveals it to be far more complex. In his wonderful new book, The Stuff of Thought, the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker observes that swearing comes from a different part of the brain to that of our articulate language and reasoning system, believing it to originate from a much more ancient part of our emotional centre and possibly located in the amygdala organ in the frontal lobe of the brain (yes, it does sound like a character from one of the less successful Star Wars films). Certainly what reinforces this is that victims of strokes who have lost their linguistic facility are often found still able to curse. It is a fundamental and hardwired part of our existence.

So, seeing that swearing is such a vital part of our human lot, I hope to start a trend by revealing my first obscenity (which surely ought to be as memorable as all our other significant 'firsts'). Summer 1983. I was eight years-old and walking with my mother and younger sister to my grandparents' house. The sun was glorious, the trees on the seaside hill verdant, and so I felt completely at ease to tell the joke I had innocently heard from DW and CR at primary school earlier that week: A boy was watching his father (who was in a hurry to get to work) shave, one morning. The father was late and rushing and inevitably cut himself with the razor. 'F*ck', he said. Exiting the bathroom and in a bad mood, he lost footing on the stairs and hissed, 'Sh*t'. The father left, and the boy, perhaps an instinctive practitioner of journalism, ran excitedly to his mother to report, 'Mom, mom. Guess what happened? Daddy just cut himself with a f*ck and then he fell down the sh*t'.

Stopping suddenly and without explaining, my mother firmly told me never, ever, to repeat that joke again. I still laugh, no longer at the joke of course, but just at the beautiful irony of my innocent self telling it, and at my sterling mother's composed surprise.