"Children can swear precisely because they don’t yet have any sense of the obscene." © Mindaugas Danys
“Oh,” said my four-year-old daughter, contemplating the water from her knocked-over glass spreading across the kitchen table. “Oh bladdy hell.”
My wife looked at me. I looked at the floor.
“BLADDY hell,” repeated Marlene with more emphasis and a world-weary shrug.
Alice’s eyebrow went up. “She didn’t learn that from me,” she said.
“Well she didn’t learn it from me, either,” I huffed. “If she was copying me she would have said ‘****ing ****ing ****ing ****’!”
“Not in front of the children!” Alice exclaimed, which was a fair point in the circumstances. And her other point was fair, too, if I’m honest. Whatever I might say, Marlene undoubtedly had picked up “bloody hell” from me, because I’m the only person in the house who uses that locution. When I’m not swearing like Viz magazine, I’m swearing like a character in an Alice Thomas Ellis novel.
It is, to be honest, something of a miracle that “bloody hell” is all she has so far picked up. I am already dreading the summons to primary school to have a solemn and awkward discussion with a schoolteacher 15 years younger than me about my daughter’s “inappropriate”—that’s the epithet that will be used—use of language. So I try.
My own parents were, if I recall, pretty good about not swearing all that much in front of us. They must have been, because otherwise I would not recall with such unmixed pleasure the expression on my mother’s face when—thinking herself alone in her study and having just dropped a full cup of coffee on the carpet—she shouted “Shit a fucking brick!” only to see the eight-year-old me emerge from under her desk.
Even in my first year at university, I confess to blenching a little whenever I heard anyone drop the C-bomb. But we live, these days, in a swearier age. That unpalatable monosyllable is everywhere—and it caused only a mild-to-mid level moral panic when, in Kick-Ass, the screenwriter Jane Goldman put it into the mouth of a 12-year-old girl.
And yet and yet. I’m a little bit torn on the subject of children and swearing. Many people are appalled by the sound of profanities issuing from the rosebud lips of the undertens. I understand that it is a moral abomination to have sweary children, and we should work to discourage it. But at the same time almost nothing makes me laugh more. That is perhaps why South Park—with its crew of potty-mouthed eight-year-olds—is so utterly winning.
The comedian Sarah Silverman got her start, she has said, because her dad taught her to swear. When his drinking buddies came round he’d get her out of bed to make them laugh: an angelic little girl in her nightie, swearing the place blue. In an interview not long ago Silverman père recalled that when Sarah was about four his mother brought round a tray of brownies and Sarah told her: “Shove ‘em up your ass, Nana!” “It was terrific!” he said.
The urge to deplore is just slightly less strong, at this point, than the urge to imitate. As Billy Connolly has pointed out, “fuck off” is “such a lovely pair of words—and it’s international.” Swear words are not hate speech. No swear word has ever drawn a drop of blood. And the days in which we believed that to say “’Zounds” was, literally, to tear the living body of Christ in heaven are long gone.
I know that when my children are in their early teens and swearing freely and deliberately and for real I shall find it tedious and ugly. But just now—when they are young enough for the profanity to be startling, and issued in innocence—let me have my fun. Isn’t it better, on the whole, that my four-year-old greet some mild setback with an exclamation of “Hellacious frigging bumgravy!” than that she play with Body Dysmorphia Barbie or Build Your Own Military-Industrial Complex Warplanes?
As I watched Marlene say “bladdy hell” I felt not repelled but a little enchanted and even, sneakingly, proud: the adult cadence in the voice, the borrowed worldliness of the gesture, the sense of her imitating with precision but no more understanding than a parrot. Children can swear, it occurs to me, precisely because they don’t yet have any sense of the obscene.
