By
Stephen Lautens
Calgary Sun - July
19, 2013
There’s a contest going on in my
house.
On the kitchen counter there are two
jars – one for my wife and one for my eleven year old son. They are the
proverbial swear jars.
There’s a couple of things you need to
know. First, you’ll notice that I don’t have a jar. That’s for the simple
reason that I don’t swear much. I know all the words, and if push comes to
shove I can put them together in creative combinations, but they don’t
automatically spring from my lips in moments of distress.
The other thing you need to know is
that in the case of my son, there are very few actual swears. This is more of a
preventative measure to keep him from introducing more colourful language into
his discussions, so he drops a nickel in the jar for what we call “near
swears”.
The problem with near swears is that
they are open to debate, and he is perfectly happy to spend twenty minutes
arguing whether any particular word or body part should be on the list. I
suppose I should be pleased that he’s learning the nuances of the infinitely
expressive English language.
Oddly, half of the time he’s arguing
in favour of something he said qualifying as a swear, even when it clearly
isn’t.
“But I meant it as a swear,” he’ll
plead. Then I have to explain to him that if intentions were illegal, we’d all
be in jail.
Why does he want to have innocent
words qualify as swears? This is where the whole swear jar thing seems to break
down.
Instead of a swear jar being a
deterrent to inappropriate language, my son has seen filling the jar with
nickels as a challenge. More than that, with one for him and one for my wife,
he sees it as a competition to see who can fill theirs first.
I’ve explained that’s not the idea of
a swear jar, and that the first to fill theirs does not get a prize. They don’t
even get to keep the money, because I think my wife promised that the cash
collected will go to a home for non-swearing orphans or something.
And since I have a vested interest in
remaining married, I won’t comment on my wife’s occasional resorting to salty
language when in extremis. After all, she got through 37 hours of labour when
our son was born without a curse touching her lips. As a woman of honour, there
will be times however when she comes back from driving to the grocery store and
silently drops a few nickels in her jar.
I clearly remember the first time I
heard my mother swear. I was about twenty years old. She touched a baking dish
in the oven with her bare hand and dropped it. Oddly, the burn didn’t cause the
swear – it was looking at the resulting dinner all over the kitchen floor.
That’s when she calmly uttered a single curse. After a second or two of
silence, we both burst out laughing.
My father didn’t swear either. When he
had to use a forbidden word when telling a story he always spelled it out.
The problem is casual cursing has
crept into our day to day lives, and in spite of all the parental hovering kids
will be exposed to it at younger and younger ages.
For now, I’m happy to charge for the
near swears, although I’m still not sure he gets it.
“Dad, can I borrow some nickels? I’m
going to play some video games.”
© Stephen Lautens
