The Curse of the Big Mouth
THINKING BACK on some of the dumb shit we did as teenagers, I started to feel an almost desperate need to believe one idiotic (on retrospect) but thoroughly amusing (at the time) bit of teenage stupidity we succumbed to "back in the day" was not just isolated to our particular school and our particular generation. Interestingly, I got my affirmation years later.... as a parent with teenagers.
In high school, we were required to take a foreign language credit. At the time, our district offered only French and Spanish, so we were herded like good little sheeplings into one class or the other. By the end of the first week of class, we could all swear in that language; it was practically one of the first things we learned, in fact. Of course, this knowledge was not imparted unto us by the teacher but by the upperclassmen who had learned it during THEIR first week of class, as underclassmen; and the knowledge rolled on from year to year. I just had to believe it was not endemic to a bunch of hicks back in the 1980s, like a disease picked up from the water or a side effect of pesticide sprayed on the fields.
I'm the verbal equivalent of a tone-deaf musician in anything other than my native English, so it was kind of a coin toss which language to take. There I was, freshman year, in French I, the French III and IV students passing along the sacred knowledge of prior generations.... Really important shit like casse-toi, pauvre con and other stuff you could say and know you would not get into trouble, since anyone not privy had no idea what the hell you were saying anyhow. It takes the punch out of telling someone "fuck you, prick" in French when they don't understand what you're saying, but when you're 13, anything illicit is something to laugh about like a hyena on steroids. Then, of course, were the little tidbits passed amongst ourselves based on our various ancestries, like gruba dupa and lutsch meine eier.
We were really fucking weird. Unfortunately, *my* weirdness never really went away.
When I was young, I was fascinated by sign language and scarfed down as much as I could, trying to learn. The attention span of a 7-year-old, though, has a tendency to put a damper on taking knowledge-seeking activities to higher levels; not to mention the fact I had no one to talk to in Sign, so it was kind of a lost cause.
Years later, I met The Husband. Who is Deaf. Who only "speaks" ASL. Who does not read lips. Shit. I once again found myself in that favorite position of mine,the one between the rock and the hard spot: I really just wanted to fuck so I kind of needed to learn how to talk to him, if for no other reason than to communicate said desire to fuck.
Thus began my next journey into the non-English-speaking world.... And I'm not much better at signing than I am at speaking French; after almost 7 years, I still pidgin.
But this is where I got my affirmation, or at least partly. My boys were learning the language alongside me, but I needed to know the swear words. This was !vital! to learning the language, of course, and amongst the first lessons I received. No, these did not come from the books and videos I checked out at the library. They did not even come off the Internet. They came directly from a lifelong speaker of the language, a prelingually Deaf man whom I ended up not only fucking but marrying.
American Sign Language 101 gone wrong?
Back on track.... ANYHOW, we're "talking," the boys are watching and learning, and I'll be damned if they didn't pick up those dirty words out of context! Then their friends would come over and they would teach them - of course - those dirty words. THEN.... the high school (my kids go to the same schools I did, just different teachers.... I imagine most of mine are withered up and/or fossilized by now) started offering ASL as an alternative for the foreign language credit, so my oldest signed up. Having an advantage with sign being used in the home, he started that cycle anew, passing on those oh-so-important cusses to his fellow students, knowledge to be bestowed upon future generations of students....
There's gotta be something in the water.
