taste_is_sweet. Goofing Off, Fooling Around, Screwing Up or FUBAR? (Reply)

I swear a lot. I don't deny it. I'm not particularly proud of it, but I don't tend to think it's a big deal, either. My father was in the (Canadian and British) military, and even if he hadn't done it previously, he certainly learned some blunt ways of expressing himself while in the service. My mom...just kind of swears a lot. Maybe she got it from boarding school, I don't know.

My husband will occasionally say 'calice!', which actually translates directly to 'chalice' and refers to what traditionally holds the blood of Christ during Catholic services. This is the worst thing you can say in Quebec (most of their swear words tend to be focused around religion). Once as a child my poor husband was slapped across the face by his father because he said 'calice' at the dinner table.

As you can imagine, I was eager that Dom not teach this word to Javier, in case his father heard Javier saying it and slapped my son so I'd have to kill my father-in-law. Dom has been, unfortunately, only more-or-less successful, the same way I've been in not saying 'fuck', 'shit', or 'damn' where Javier can hear it. Javier sometimes will say 'calice', mostly just to see what we'll do about it. Luckily it's not very often.

Equally unfortunately, even the French speakers cheerfully say 'fuck' in Quebec, so Javier naturally learned it. He'll sometimes get a wicked gleam in his beautiful brown eyes and say fuck just for the hell of it. We've been teaching him to say, 'sac a papier!' ('paper bag!') instead--so now he'll occasionally say, 'sac a papier! Not fuck.' And smile.

I've been doing my, best to say, 'shoot', or 'darn' or the like since he started speaking, but sometimes the 'fuck' just slips out, and of course it's always when he's there to hear it....

Anyway, his occasional forays into the Big, Bad World of Limited Adult Vocabulary Under Stress has made me notice swearing in other venues, such as here on LJ. Some people just write out the words the way I do, but others might write out only part of the word (like, 'f**k'), or not use them at all.

So my friends, finally comes the thrust of this post: how do you guys feel about swearing and specifically, swearing in a public or semi-public forum like Live Journal? As you know, I've written out swear words here in the same kind of places and for the same reasons I've used them in my own speech. What I'm saying is real stuff (no matter how banal), so I use real language to express it. When I read other people's journals I always notice when they use swear words of course, but truthfully I notice it more when they use the more polite versions like word substitutes ('frack', 'darn') or only writing some of the letters. Being a child of the shared North American culture, I was also raised that swearing is bad, uncouth and lower class (blame my mom for that one), while hearing swearing all the time anyway. This means that I always get a small shiver of uncomfortableness when I either write or read swear words anywhere outside of pieces of fiction. Doesn't stop me from doing it, though.

What does swearing mean to you guys? Would you prefer if I didn't use swear words in my posts? Do you care? I'm curious and would like some freaking enlightenment. :)