Two profane words for REAL Women
The first swear word I learned was picked up on the playground of Earl Kitchener Public School in Hamilton. It was two words, actually. The second was “off.” And if you don’t know what the first is you didn’t grow up in Hamilton.
It’s still the most effective profanity I know, even though the first of the two words is pretty common these days.
Turn on the television, go to a movie or listen to your average drunk speak for a minute or two and you are bound to hear it, usually in its adjectival form and with the ever-popular dropped “g.”
An imperative variation, concluded with “you” and delivered with a bad Robert De Niro imitation is now so overused it is almost as pathetic as the extended middle finger. “Why don’t you just go to H, E, doublehockey sticks” would be more threatening.
But somehow the first cuss I ever heard retains the power it had on the playground so long ago. This has to do with its weird lack of any literal meaning. Other profanities tend to have something everyone can picture — however distasteful, incestuous, sacrilegious or anatomically impossible that picture might be.
But in the case of the phrase that caught my attention at recess that day, the carnality of the first word is entirely confounded by the second. Off? You’d think that when it comes to copulation “on” would be more to the point.
It remains an unfathomable command: vulgar but without any concrete image of what its vulgarity actually means. It’s a verbal talisman: an incantation that is magical because nobody understands it. And everybody does. Its mystery makes it something still worth hurling.
But even people who swear a lot know that it is used sparingly and only when something, or someone, deserves to be so utterly dismissed you don’t want them merely to descend to the underworld. You don’t even want them to do anything inappropriate to their mother. You just want their dumb ideas to get lost. Seriously lost. For once and for all.
It is a profanity that is almost always used to end discussion when it becomes clear that further discussion is pointless.
Two abrupt, one-syllable words neatly encapsulate the following content: I don’t argue with people whose argument is either undeniably wrong, completely idiotic or beneath contempt. I’ve listened to quite enough, thank you, and I’ve decided this discussion is going to end. Now.
But content isn’t everything. Even on the Earl Kitchener playground I could see that the impact of language depends on its tone. And in the case of what I heard whispered in the boys’ line after the recess bell had gone, the tone comes built-in.
They are two words that are difficult to say together without conveying equal parts impatience and ridicule. Which works wonderfully well. When something is wrong, stupid and cruel, impatience and ridicule are what it deserves to get. And the more rudely they are delivered, the better.
Those of us who believe simple words still have real power can tell REAL Women to just . . .
All of which brings to mind REAL Women of Canada and their ridiculous (I might go so far as to say Putinesque) stand on homosexuality and gay rights. It’s a thought I find bracing.
As someone who works with tools as old-fashioned as words I am thrilled the best response is so purely low-tech. Others will engage more elaborately. Pollsters might wade in. Television and radio might satisfy their lust for debate. Politicians might pay attention. But those of us who believe simple words, on their own, still have real power can tell REAL Women to just . . .
Well, you know what I think they deserve to be told to do. To say more would be a waste of perfectly good language. davidmacfarlane.mail@gmail.com