Frack and Frell Go to …

I was listening to NPR a little earlier today, and I heard a piece on a young man in Pasadena who has started a “No Cussing Club.” McKay Hatch’s parents, apparently, have written the book on raising a G-rated child. (Literally. It’s Raising a G-Rated Family in an X-Rated World by Brent and Phelecia Hatch.) Young McKay has followed in his parents’ G-rated footsteps and encourages all young people to foreswear swearing.

Maybe I’m a bad, bad mama because I’ve just gotta admit that swearing is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the list of things I worry about with my kid. (And I think that seeing the world as generally X-rated is pretty cynical and perhaps even a little paranoid.)

In fact, profanity just doesn’t bother me at all, and I’ll be the first to admit: Mama’s got a potty-mouth. Mama does do a good job of reining in her wayward tongue when DD is in earshot, but no one has ever accused me of being prim (or proper, for that matter). I don’t go out of my way to expose DD to profanity, mind you, but I don’t shield her ears when we’re in public either.

McKay suggests that we all say “pickles” and “shoot” and such euphemisms for the “dirty words” we really mean. I don’t really see the point. For one thing, there’s a real satisfaction from letting a choice word fly when you slam your fingers in the door or drop your perfectly scooped $10 ice cream cone on the not-so-pristine ice cream parlor floor. A satisfaction that just doesn’t materialize with an “oh pickles.” Admit it, illicit words are just more FUN! Even DD gets the humor and sneaky little satisfaction from saying “oh POOP” – high profanity for a two-year-old – when something moderately annoying, yet simultaneously funny happens to her And really, in a sense, what’s the difference in saying “pickles” or a four-letter-word when you mean the same thing when you say them???

So, while I hope DD doesn’t start letting the f-bomb fly anytime soon – there is, after all, a time and place for all behavior – when she inevitably does, I doubt she’ll get in trouble. (Maybe a brief conversation about not cussing in front of your great-grandmother – even your mama knows better than that!)

Because I’m pretty okay with raising a PG-rated child. Maybe even PG-13. Hell (whoops!), when she’s old enough, she can even be R-rated, if she wants. Now if we ever get to that X-rated point, THEN I’ll draw that firm line!


**P.S. For those of you who aren’t SciFi geeks like me, “frack” and “frell” are the creative, censor-evading words used by characters in, respectively, Battlestar Galatica and Farscape. :)