I made three New Year’s resolutions almost twelve months ago: visit ten of the 70 Orkney islands (check), prepare five new/different types of seafood (check), and my perennial: swear less. Now, to be clear, I’m not talking about when you hit your thumb with a hammer, or drop a bottle of milk on the floor, or anything like that. And, as you may have noticed, I do like a good acronym (FFS, WTF, etc…) in writing. But I have a very good vocabulary and there is no reason not to exercise it when speaking, which is why I include reducing swearing annually in my personal challenges. For the most part, I’ve done okay over the years at holding the foul language in check. Then I moved to the UK.
Swearing is much more prevalent here, possibly even more so in Scotland than England (but I have little to base that on, just a hunch). Both Canadian and British television have ‘watershed’ times, times after which the content of TV shows can be more ‘mature’. But I don’t remember some of the language I hear on Graham Norton, or Mock the Week, or really, almost any serialized UK programme, ever being said on a Canadian show. Staff in shops swear in front of customers (not at them, in front of them), I hear quite a range of Anglo-Saxon on the streets, and in Scotland kids say the foulest things.
I’m also not talking about some of the milder words, I’m talking true profanity here. Of course, part of the issue is that there are words here that are considered, if not exactly acceptable, at least somewhat unimportant, but which would absolutely get you a formal discipline at BMO if you used them in the workplace. I had an interesting conversation recently with my cousins (a nurse & a cop) who were surprised to find out just how truly offensive I found some fairly common words (starting with a ‘c’ or with a ‘t’ for example – I leave it to you to figure them out). To my cousins, hearing (or using) words like that would be water off a duck’s back; to me, they made me cringe. (They actually think of one of them as a term of endearment. Truly.)
And yet, despite my claims of cringing, I find swearing less and less offensive by the day. I don’t think I’ve used any of the truly profane (by Canadian standards) words aloud myself, unless directing someone to a small town here in Orkney (look it up), but I no longer flinch when I hear them. And, I do find the hammer-to-the-thumb words slipping out far more often than before in just normal conversation. It’s a slippery slope, and I head back to Canada in ten months – FFS, I’d better get my act together.
So we know at least one of this New Year’s resolutions, dammit.