I’ve given up swearing for Lent and it’s quickly proven to be a bad idea

Bill Linnane

Swearing is like an antibiotic — overuse it and it loses potency. Photo: Getty/Picture posed

March 08 2023 02:30 AM

Us men are complex creatures. I know we like to portray ourselves as easily pleased simpletons, but the truth is that we are unknowable labyrinths.

Take me, for example: in last week’s column I was clutching my pearls about the coarsening of everyday life, as evidenced by the increasing appearance of swear words in the printed news media. This week I am telling you that I love to swear. Few things bring me as much relief as spitting out some colourful language when things go wrong, be it when I hit a pothole, bash my thigh into the corner of the kitchen table, or realise at 8.25am of a Monday that a child’s uniform is in mid wash cycle as opposed to on a child’s body where it is meant to be.

My wife tells me that until she started dating me, she never swore, but now has a mouth like a sewer. I do try to point out that the key context she is missing there is that when she met me she had zero kids and now she has four, so throwing your head back and screaming obscenities at the vacant skies above is pretty much a key coping mechanism. Blame the effing kids, not me.

Of course I don’t go around swearing all the time. The secret to successful potty mouth is to understand context. Swearing is like an antibiotic — you don’t want to overuse it or it loses all potency. You also need to know where to use it as well as when — swearing at your kids is bad, swearing at your kids in public is worse, and swearing at other people’s kids is the sort of thing that gets you a visit from the local constabulary.

Enjoy cursing as a part of a balanced vocabulary, and in moderation. It’s also better to swear at things rather than people. Shouting a veritable Inter Cert’s worth of Fs, Bs, and even a few Cs at the glass plate in the microwave when it wobbles out of its bracket and refuses to get back in is perfectly acceptable. Unleashing the same barrage at the child who dislodged it probably isn’t.

But even I know when it’s time to take a step back and maybe lay off the throttle on the potty mouth, and so it is with a heavy heart that I have to tell you I have given up swearing for Lent. Yes, Lent, the thing us atheists are not meant to observe.

Like I said, I’m a complex being. I just felt that it’s not a bad thing to take some time apart from the love of my life — swearing — and see if absence makes the heart grow fonder.

I came to the realisation that the last two years of social isolation may have contributed to the frequency of my swears, and that if I didn’t stop peppering every utterance with profanity I would simply start to sound like a loon. One of the great ironies in all this is that I judge people quite harshly for public bad language and won’t allow my older children, one of whom is 20, to swear. I just think a light dusting of profanity adds sparkle to some private situations, but too much and you just sound like an angry idiot.

We are now two weeks into Lent and I can tell you that giving up swearing was a terrible idea. It wasn’t my idea though, it was my kids’. They wanted me to set up a swear jar, which I intended to do until I remembered that nobody uses cash anymore and I wasn’t going to be going into the bank like Annie Wilks from Misery to cash one big bastard of a check and get some Christing money for my bitchly swear jar. But being aware of my language is working. There were several close calls when I made a noise like a slowly deflating balloon for a good ten seconds before limply muttering “fiddlesticks” in a disappointed tone, but I am getting there.

Of course, it’s not really about swearing, but about stress. I had come to the conclusion that I was slowly being crushed by stress and that the powerful language being used domestically was a symptom of this. So I go to the gym, go for walks, and try not to drink 10 cups of coffee a day. I’m never going to be a zen master, or find complete peace in this world, but if I can make it to Easter without cussing at the dog or a child or my wife, then I will consider this Lent to have been a big effing success.