Painting With Cuss Words
I think Martha Schafer hit the nail on the head when she said, “Sometimes a cuss word is the best word — especially when you don’t use them all the time.”
It’s the second half of her statement that resonates with me. When every sentence you utter has at least one cuss word in it then those cuss words lose any and all impact.
Once, at a recent job, I worked with a female co-worker for a year and a half. One day, she put her hand on her hip and turned her head sideways as she looked at me and said, “You know what? I’ve been working with you for a year and a half and not once have I ever heard you cuss! What the hell is wrong with you?”
I was shocked by this. I cuss. Maybe not a lot but I was surprised that I had gone a year and a half without ever cussing in this woman’s presence. What, in fact, was wrong with me?
While I rarely cuss because of any expectations I have of how others perceive me, it is mostly because of expectations I have of myself. I have spent a long life trying to expand my vocabulary. I love learning and using new words. To me, cussing is a reluctance to expand and utilize a more expanded vocabulary. It’s an easy way out. It does not reinforce what I have learned.
So I promptly uttered a few sentences chock-full of cuss words in front of this woman.
She nodded her head back and forth, “Nope, it just doesn’t sound right coming from you.”
Like everything, cussing is neither bad nor good, it’s how well you use it. I obviously wasn’t very good at it.
Once I was watching a video of a lecture given by the spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle. I had read his books and had watched several of his lectures and I had never heard him cuss. But right in the middle of this lecture he suddenly started cussing like a drunken sailor. The audience broke out in uproarious laughter as did I. It was so profoundly out of character for him and it was so unexpected! I don’t even remotely remember what he was talking about but it turned out that his little cussing tirade perfectly illustrated whatever point he was making. His cussing actually brought about understanding of what he was saying. It was one of the best usages of cussing that I’ve ever heard. If he cussed all the time no one would have gotten his point.
I have realized that the fictional characters in my short stories and novels cuss a lot more than I do. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to make them believable or maybe they are a subconscious outlet for my own cussing restraint. I don’t know.
But I really do cuss — and not just when I stub my toe. Really, I do.
Cussing is like a color. When a painter is painting her masterpiece painting she wants to be able to use all colors. But it is the proportion of one color to all the other colors that determines its effectiveness. The absence of that one color can create an imbalance to the overall image but the excessive use of that color can also create an imbalance that throws the whole picture off. A true artist knows how to use color to effectively create a masterpiece.
And we are all artists, right? Of course, I have not used a single cuss word over the course of this response up until now. What the fucking hell kind of artist am I?
