Mind Your Language

"Words are potent weapons for all causes, good or bad."

-Manly Hall, author.

I still remember the first time I was on the receiving end of a curse, a “bad word”. I cried, and I told on him (now my best friend) to our English teacher. Fifteen years to the day I was called the B-word, I live in a society where my professor asked us to – and I quote – “get the f**k out”. Hardly two decades in, have curses gone from shenanigans to household commons?

It had taken me four more years before I uttered my first curse. Yes, four years to muster up my courage to go all unholy on someone. Bad words are named so for a reason, simply because they are bad (duh). We have all been told not to use them, ever. They are never encouraged by elders, least of all by our parents. Yet, we have all caught our old men go berserk and use words we never knew even existed. This might sound hypocritical but to be fair, curses are - as bad as they are - a necessity. How else can we vent out our anger without breaking someone’s bones? Peeing on them seems a legit solution, but who knows when they would flow? Cursing is thus a reliable mode of rage.

Curse once, there’s no turning back. Of course, we knew our limits, tried our best never to cross them. It was like a privilege; we cursed rarely, and we used it gallantly, if I may call it that. Never around elders, never at friends, only during fights and bitter quarrels.

Enter Hollywood. During the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the film industry became bolder and gave away PG-13’s to movies dealing in curses. Everyone now got to see a world whose tongue was let loose. People from 6 to 106 got to know them. Curses weren't special anymore, not after films ruined their reputation. The music industry wanted to contribute too, of course. One did not simply write a song without a thorough dosage of language. As if “Baby Got Back” wasn't bad enough, we got explicit versions whose names were explicit. Enough said.

Now, 7-year-olds can use them more fluently than they can speak English. Somewhere down the road, the concept of curses took a turn for the worse. This hit us, and it hit us hard. Not only did we use curses to demoralize the enemy, but it also had an added benefit of boosting our self-confidence. Now, all we get for an unparliamentary comment is a smirk or, more commonly, indifference. They do not have the superiority factor they gave the user any more.

Every Tom, Dick (no pun intended) and Harry now knows what cousins of cats and better halves of hens mean. Bad words have become so common that they are even used to greet people. It is now time to treat bad words with the respect they deserve. We need to preserve them, increase their value and restrict their usage again. This world needs a better class of curses, period.