Swearing

In response to Meg's blog on swearing http://megmakesnosense.blogspot.com/ I believe that swearing is wrong, purely because of my upbringing, yet if my mother knew how I talked around my friends she would wash my mouth out with soap. My parents never swore around me when I was younger (and they still don't swear to this day) - I remember once when I was about 8 and my sister called me a bitch. She didn't know what it meant or that it was a 'naughty word', she had just heard it at school. However, that didn't stop me from telling my Mum and getting her into trouble...muha ha ha ha...

I went to the park yesterday with some friends for a game of football and I heard a little girl (she only looked about 4 years old) calling her younger sister a bitch and telling her to "fuck off" - I actually stood there stunned for a while because I couldn't believe that this innocent-looking little girl had been corrupted by bad language at such a young age. I assumed the reason that she had a mouth like a sewer was because that was the kind of language she was used to hearing from her parents, or maybe they even talked to her in that manner.

Although I swear frequently, (for dramatic effect, of course!) and even moreso when I've had a few drinks, I can honestly say that when I'm a mother I will never swear in front of my children - in fact I will try and stop swearing full stop because it horrifies me that children as young as 4 can swear on a regular basis and consider it the norm.

Why do we swear? Is it out of habit? Most likely, as last year I 'quit' swearing and lasted for about 9 months; it's not as hard to quit as people think, it only took me about 2 weeks to banish bad language from my vocabulary. I had a friend in college who used to say that if people swore then it proved how incapable they were of communicating their feelings without swearing, that it showed how poor their vocabulary was.

What is the reason that we started swearing in the first place? Because we either heard it from our parents or picked it up in school from our friends. It is part of our natural human instinct to integrate new words into our speech if we hear them on a regular basis. Here is a link to a website on what's wrong with swearing: http://www.cusscontrol.com/swearing.html it also has tips on how to stop swearing, just in case any of you were interested!