The Only Bad Words Are Words That Hurt People

[I posted an abbreviated version of this in a comment at Herculodge.]

I developed a habit of using foul language many years ago when I worked 3rd shift at one of the stores my company operates. I was at that time between college degrees, needed a job, and went to work doing what I knew how to do - stock grocery shelves. I worked 3rd shift with a bunch of other guys, each of us entering, leaving, or skirting alcoholism and divorce, and developed a string of profanity that flowed effortlessly in pieces or in whole depending on the need.

(ROT13 this string to enjoy... Tbqqnza zbgureshpxvat pbpxfhpxvat fbabsnovgpu. What's ROT13?)

I brought up my son to understand that the only bad words are the words that hurt people. That may be a traditional 4-letter curse word, but it is far more often words like "stupid," "fat," "lazy," etc; those words, if applied at critical moments, can scar a child for a lifetime, and reinforce the behavior they are meant to change.

For many authority figures that intersected my conservative religious upbringing, this distinction is meaningless, even laughable, but as an educated linguist (who never found work as a linguist but is fortunate enough to work daily with language), the distinction is fundamental to language and relationships, as basic as phones and phonemes.

I try very hard to control my togue in front of my 2-year-old daughter, and my wife is very good at calling out the times I fail. But I will remind my 2-year-old throughout her childhood, as I did my son, who is now in college, of the same little axiom, and if she embraces it as well as he has, she will be mindful of others with every word, 4-letter and otherwise.

(Of course, the same axiom that controls language in one circumstance, liberates it in another.)