My wife is also starting to learn how to use dirty words (in much the same self-conscious way other women take up painting at an advanced age or enroll in adult education courses in psychology, art history, or Jean-Paul Sartre). She is not much good at that, either. Her hell's and damn's carry too much emphasis, although her Oh shit's have the ring of authority by now. She is not as convincing as the rest of the men and women in our several social groups in the jaded indifference we affect toward obscenity. My fifteen-year-old daughter is already much better than my wife with dirty words. My daughter uses dirty language with us liberally in order to impress us with her intelligence; often, she uses it directly at us (especially at my wife), probing to see how far she will be allowed to go. (She's not allowed to go far by me.) And my boy, I can tell, is working up the courage to experiment at home with a dirty word or two. (He isn't sure what the word fuck means, although he knows it's dirty. He was under the impression fuck was the word[…]
EXCERPT FROM
Heller, Joseph. "SOMETHING HAPPENED." A Dell Book, 2011-09-01. iBooks.
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