Picture it: Summer, 1985. The San Fernando Valley. Joe Torre's Baseball Camp. A laid-back dude who was attending Princeton, probably 19 or so, drives campers to and from the Camp's complex each day. He overhears, and participates in, lots of spirited camper conversations.
One day he decides he's had enough of something. It being 1985, the parallel to the Cold War was probably clear to him. He decides--for himself, for his campers, for society!--to make his stand and impart some wisdom, turning his bus into Helsinki and our ride home that day into a Strategic Arms Limitation Talk: "You guys, you use the f-word WAY too much." He then proceeds to explain that swearing is ok, and can be used effectively, but its effectiveness is diminished by overuse. "You start off by saying 'Fuck you' but you've got nowhere to go from there. When I was your age, if you resorted to 'Fuck you' it meant the argument was over and if the other guy didn't stop, punches would be thrown." Make no mistake, our failure to respect the power of the word "fuck" mutually assured the destruction of civilization! Whether the other fuckheads in that van that day took it to heart, I can't say. But I sure did.
All these years later, when I speak and when I write, I think of myself not as a Cold War military strategist buts as a painter--every color in the spectrum is on my palette: archaic words, slang words, long words, short words, hard-to-pronounce words, words-I-think-I-know-the-meaning-of-but-look-up-just-to-be-sure. To mix analogies though, I think of high-powered curse words like the F-Bomb not just as nuclear-tipped ICBMs, but as bold, deep, rich colors. Sometimes it wouldn't look right to use them, but sometimes it wouldn't look right without them.
So I had to smile last week when Joe Biden referred to the passage of health care reform as a Big Fucking Deal, because it certainly fucking was!
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