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I Swear

Yes, I curse in front of my kids. But as a Jewish parent, I have a particularly rich history of curses to choose from.

by
Marjorie Ingall
February 23, 2016
Illustration: Tablet Magazine
Illustration: Tablet Magazine
Illustration: Tablet Magazine
Illustration: Tablet Magazine

I recently enjoyed a rant by the writer Kate Levkoff justifying why she curses in front of her wee spawn. My reaction: Sing it, sister. Because I swear a blue streak. And I kiss my children with this mouth.

Levkoff writes: “At the altar of motherhood, I have already sacrificed sleeping, sanity, perky boobs, my knowledge of popular music, career opportunities, manicured nails, all of our money, fashion, an understanding of current events, the energy to complete even a TV marathon, slim-fit jeans—I could go on. Must I also give up my communication style and my preferred mode of self-expression? Oh, fuck no, babies, no fucking way.”

No fucking way, indeed. For me, keeping a civil tongue in front of the kids was a losing proposition from the start. Let me tell you a little story. When Josie was tiny, before she could speak, I spent a lot of time—between bouts of nursing and weeping—engaged in a never-ending battle to keep squirrels from destroying our garden. I’d run outside, clutching my little bundle of baby, to sprinkle cayenne pepper and spray Predator Pee all over the plants, cursing the little rodents to high heaven. When Josie started talking, months later, I put a damper on my foul language; I wanted to be a good role model. And yet. At around age 2, she pointed a chubby little finger at a squirrel and clearly and distinctly said, “fuggah.” Visitors would tell her, “That’s a squirrel!” She would firmly correct them: “FUGGAH.” Our guests would ask us, baffled, “Why does she call squirrels fuggahs?” I’d gulp and say I had no idea whatsoever.

Now my kids are 11 and 14. We tried—we really did—to keep our language smut-free. But it’s so hard! Everyone is so stupid and annoying! We need to use the full splendor of our words about how stupid and annoying everyone is! And if we drop a book on our foot or the cat leaps merrily to claw our hand raw while we’re tearing off a farshtunkiner piece of toilet paper, are we really supposed to cry out, “Oh, fudge!”?

Are we really not allowed to temper the misery of long car trips by belting out, en famille, the score to Avenue Q? (For years, Maxie thought the lyric to “Schadenfreude” was “Watching a frat boy realize just what he put his dicken,” before finally asking me, “What’s a dicken?”) Must I only listen to squeaky-clean tunes when there are children present, even if the children are totally engaged in their own play and not paying attention to my old-lady music? (I did once turn off Nicki Minaj’s “Did It On Em” because a dad who was over with his kids for a play date was absolutely horrified at me.)

The swear jar. (Photo: Marjorie Ingall)
The swear jar. (Photo: Marjorie Ingall)

Let me assure you that we have talked about the proper place and time for cursing. Maxie has made a family swear jar and occasionally remembers to force us to put money in it. (The F-word costs $1, the B-word “when used not in conjunction with female dogs” costs 50 cents, and the D-word costs 25 cents.) We have talked about the difference between cursing at home and cursing out in the world, where others have more delicate sensibilities than we do. My kids know I try (with mixed success) not to spout obscenities in front of my mother and mother-in-law, because they are way more fucking civilized than I am. If I know someone will be truly distressed by my blaspheming like a drunken sailor, I try to keep it clean.

And there are some words we simply do not say. To me, the N-word is infinitely worse than the F-word. (People who are in a particular group can debate whether to say it within the group, but we who are not of the group do not get to be part of the debate, and we do not use the word ourselves.) The word “gay” is not an insult and should never be used as such. As a family we’ve talked a lot about how “retard” is a slap in the face to people with special needs (Josie wrote an essay about its use in a popular middle-grade novel), and my kids know that I’ve worked hard to ban it from my vocabulary. I grew up saying that word, and old habits die hard. When it (very) occasionally slips out, I apologize profusely and share my dismay and anger at myself. When we watched Project Runway a few seasons ago, the adorable winner Christian Siriano had a catch phrase, “hot tranny mess,” about ugly and tacky designs. Back then, we laughed at the way he drawled those words with his theatrical eye-roll … but then we learned that “tranny” was a slur. And even cute little gay boys with amusing chicken-like hairdos should not say it. And we stopped saying it. (So has Siriano, who has apologized for using the term in his younger days.)

But saying bad things is fun. I do not wish to ban fun. Fortunately, being creative is fun, too. We are huge fans of Shakespearean insults: Maxie’s first-grade class put on an abridged production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the kids used to love screaming, “You canker-blossom!” at each other. Shakespeare also gave us “thou cream-faced loon”; “you scullion, you rampallian, you fustilarian—I’ll tickle your catastrophe”; “thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle”; “thou leathern-jerkin, crystal-button, not-pated, agate-ring, puke-stocking, caddis-garter, smooth-tongue Spanish pouch”; and “thou whoreson obscene greasy tallow-catch.” Also, let it never be said that social media is a worthless time-suck. From Twitter we’ve learned all kinds of truly vile British curses aimed at Prime Minister David Cameron, such as “you glistening, meat-faced dolt,” “you fucking deluded spunktrumpet dishface,” “you’re a fucking idiot cockwomble,” “you prick-faced cock,” and the simple “bite a pylon, panface.” Former NFL kicker Chris Kluwe is a genius of avant-garde cursing, calling misogynist video gamers “paint-huffing shitgoblins,” “slopebrowed weaseldicks,” and “basement-dwelling, Cheetos-huffing, poopsock-sniffing douchepistols.” As fans of the late, lamented TV show Firefly, we enjoy its made-up Mandarin curses such as “you stupid inbred sack of meat,” and “frog-humpin’ bastard.”

But why turn to Elizabethan England or 26th-century fictional outer space to find excellent invective? Ashkenazi Jews ought to take great pride in our rich heritage of cursing. We have produced a deep and marvelous ocean of imprecation, from a huge variety of words that mean loser to a huge variety of words that mean penis.

The Yiddish language is a rich cholent of impressive insults. The Yiddish Radio Project compiled a list that includes such hits as “Leeches should drink him dry” (trinkn zoln im piavkes); “for as many years as he’s walked on his feet, let him walk on his hands, and the rest he should crawl on his ass” (vifil yor er iz gegangn oyf di fis zol er geyn af di hent un di iberike zol er zikh sharn oyf di hintn); “he should be transformed into a chandelier, to hang by day and burn by night” (migulgl zol er vern in a henglayhter, by tog zol er hengen, un bay nakht zol er brenen); “he should crap blood and pus” (er zol kakn mit blit un mit ayter); and “a young child should be named after him” (a kleyn kind zol nokh im heysn). (You get the last one, right? Ashkenazim don’t name babies after the living.) My father, a champion curser, was always fond of “vaksn zolstu vi a tsibele mitn kop in dr’erd,” the classic “may you grow like an onion with your head in the ground.” And then there’s the delightfully cynical “may your bones be broken as often as the Ten Commandments” (zoln dayne beyner zikh brekhn azoy oft vi di Aseres-Hadibres), the odd “may you turn into a blintz and be snatched by a cat” (vern zol fun dir a blintshik, un di kats zol dikh khapn), and the oddly specific “may you run to the toilet every three minutes or every three months” (loyfn zolstu in beys-hakise yede dray minut oder yede dray khadoshim).

The only Ladino curse I know is “orare las di Korach a uno”—shower Korach’s curses on someone. That means to wish upon them what happened to Korach, a dude who tried to lead a revolt against Moses in the Torah and got swallowed alive by the earth. No one wants that. (A piece in The Times of Israel about Israeli profanity also mentions pustema, a Ladino-derived word for a pus-filled wound that is today a sexist slur. I’ll pass on that one.)

Perhaps the greatest source of horrible curses of all is the Torah. Check out Ki Tavo, the Wes Craven movie of parashiot. God tells the people what will happen to them if they don’t do everything God tells them: An invader nation will come to besiege them and they will have to eat their babies just to survive. Even the sweetest mother will “begrudge the husband of her embrace and her own son and daughter, and the infants who emerge from between her legs, and her own children whom she will bear, for she will eat them in secret, in destitution, in the siege and the desperation which your enemies will inflict upon you.” And after the secret baby-eating, not only will the Lord hit you with all the plagues of Egypt, but “also the Lord will bring upon you every disease and plague which is not written in this Torah scroll.” God will smite you with smiting that hasn’t been invented yet. God will be on you like a rat on pizza. God will hit you so hard your children will be born bruised.

After this kind of verbal beat-down—from the ultimate parental figure, no less—letting fly a few F-bombs doesn’t seem so bad. So, chill out about my motherly cursing, you schvantz.

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Marjorie Ingall is a former columnist for Tablet, the author of Mamaleh Knows Best, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review.