Is all your cussing hurting your health?
by Jessica Ashley, Shine staff, on Tue Sep 2, 2008
Early in the year, a girlfriend of mine landed a Lent bomb in the middle of a lunchtime conversation we had over Bloody Marys and big salads: She'd given up cussing. For at least forty days. Maybe longer.
I sucked down my drink as she told me about the challenges of de-four-wording her vocabulary, even after she'd significantly reduced her swearing since her babies were born and talking like she did in college just no longer seemed appropriate.
It was all I could do not to let a string of cuss words loose, the same string of cuss words that wrapped around every single thought that entered my brain once my friend said she was done with that kind of talk. I felt like a four-year old who has just been told by a (much better behaved) kid that she is no longer going to stick her finger into the box fan. All I wanted to do was stick my finger into the effing fan.
But I held back. First, swearing is no fun to do alone. This isn't the only reason many of us parents choose not to %&@# in front of our children. But let's face it, not having someone yell back, "%$#@! YEAH! You're right! That is $@^&*!! up!" markedly decreases the impact of choosing such vocabulary.
Second, any foul word I'd choose (and believe me, I'm enough of a cusser that I know how to choose my words well) would sound even worse, even more venomous, even trashier if it was met with a diluted "freak that!" or "what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks?!" My words would inevitably hang in the air, would be shamefully obvious rather than intricately woven in as they are meant to be. The cuss words would be the dirty fingernails on the hand wearing a three-carat diamond ring: Sad and embarassing.
Who wants a well-chosen string of swear words to be sad and embarassing? Not me. Cussing to me feels liberating, rebellious and sometimes just necessary to release the tension of a terrible driver in front of me or a bad day on the divorce trip or yet another broken coffee pot on my granite countertop. Most of the time, cussing makes me feel good.
This is why my friend's Lenten deprivation shocked me even more, especially when she proclaimed that cutting out the cussing felt freeing to her. She said, as hard is was to self-censor, it felt healthy to revisit long-forgotten words in her personal lexicon. It felt good for her drop the drama of swearing and keep her conversations much more low-key.
That made me curious: Is cussing damning your health or does swearing sometimes make you feel better?
I've certainly cut back on my "bad" language over the years and I am definitely choosy about who gets to hear the f-bomb fly freely from my mouth. That said, I also have no intentions of red-lining the blue words from my own vocabulary. And while I was shocked that my once sailor-mouthed girlfriend cleaned her conversations up, I didn't judge her for speaking so squeaky. Not at all.
In fact, I think that her challenge to stop swearing during Lent could have been even healthier than cutting out chocolate or coffee. I just wonder if she binged on the $#@& the way most people I know chow down on sweets once Lent is officially over.
There's lots of advice out there about how to stop swearing, complete with great soul-searching and self-helpy questions about the image you project when you're rattling off curse words and whether you are punishing yourself or stifling your free expression when you flail them around haphazardly. Hey, I love a good soul-searching, self-helpy session and I may even pour myself a big mug of tea, light some vanilla-ginger candles and get to work journaling on why I am the Queen of Cuss some days. I'm just not sure the end result has a big enough benefit for me, if I could swear that not swearing would make me healthier.
I will tell you that I've seen my girlfriend a few times since our pre-Easter lunch and I did hear a few offenses fly from her mouth. I also noticed she was cussing a lot less, even when the subject of husbands came up. She isn't any different and I don't think her attidude's changed. But gosh darn it, her vocabulary has expanded and for that, I give her a big...thumbs up.
And you? Have you ever quit cursing?
