A Wrangler on Aging: My Language is Deteriorating

No kidding—it really is! I’ve always taken pride in the fact that I have a good vocabulary. My mom insisted we have extensive vocabularies and use them appropriately. We played word games voraciously when I was kid—Scrabble, Boggle, Probe—and to this day, family gatherings include word games. Our latest fave is Apples to Apples—très fun! I’m a whiz at spelling, and usually, if someone asks me what a word means, I can come up with the correct definition without running to a dictionary. My grasp of language and its appropriate use is part of why I’m a good copy editor (I have clients who’ll testify, honest!). I adore discovering new words and finding ways to use them in my writing.

So it surprises me to find that I’m using expletives more frequently as I get older. And I’m not talking about the occasional crap or damn. I’m talking the real words—the ones that would have gotten my mouth washed out with soap when I was a kid. You know, the words from George Carlin’s infamous list. (Google it!) I’ve never really been a language prude, but I’ve always been someone who disdained “bad words” as the language of the uneducated. For years, I believed that profanity demonstrated a lack of creativity and a poor vocabulary.

Lately though, I’ve discovered that often the best word, the very best word I can use in some situations is a profane one. Sometimes people behave like ass-hats and that’s the only suitable word to use to describe them, so I use it—but always appropriately. I’ve developed serious post-menopausal short-term memory loss, so s#*t! pretty much takes care of the frustration of not remembering where I put my damn reading glasses. And sometimes, in the throes of a particularly gnarly hot flash (yes, I’m still flashing like a freaking lightning bug!), or when I’m restless and my emotions are in a confused knot, I just want to scream the F-bomb. So I do and it makes me feel better.

As a writer, I’m not particularly proud of this, but as a woman, I’m kind of intrigued with the relief that one good loud F-bomb can bring. How many centuries have men used profanity to relieve tension? Husband has always maintained that calling a broken anything a bad name is the first step to fixing it. You know, maybe my language isn’t really deteriorating at all, maybe it’s just getting more colorful—yeah, that’s it! I like that! I’m colorful! And even though I’ve added some profanity to my vocabulary, I’m not going to be adding it to my small-town romance stories—that would take away from the sweetness of it all, but know this...when my characters are up to here with whatever situation I've put them in, when they are angry or frustrated beyond measure, they're surely thinking what I won't write!

How about it, Wranglers? Where are you on the topic of profanity? Do you use it? Does it bother you when other people do? Talk to me and feel free to use whatever word fits your current mood.