They're starting it younger and younger these days. I was at least five before I even heard about it. But my daughter did it for the first time the other night, in the back of the car, and she's not two years old yet. She uttered her first swear word, writes Conor Goodman
In the front of the vehicle, I was telling my wife about a row I'd just had with a cashier in the supermarket. I'll spare you the details of this fascinating tale, but suffice to say that an accurate report required liberal use of "offensive" language. And at some point during the narrative, the ignored back-seat passenger decided to assert her presence by parroting one of these phrases.
"F***'S SAKE!" she bellowed.
The best thing to do in these circumstances is to ignore the comment altogether. A mild rebuke is probably also acceptable, if utterly futile. Some form of distraction - producing a soother, reeling off a few nursery rhymes, rear-ending another car to release the airbags - might also dissuade her from effing and blinding her way through the pre-school years.
The one thing you should not do is laugh so loud and so long that you nearly wet yourself. So that's what we did.
"F***'s sake!" trilled the delighted toddler, to further gales of laughter. "F***'s sake! F***'s sake! F***'s sake!" Suddenly it's her party-piece.
Since then, I have been trying to curb my utterances of the F-word, various B-words, and other words whose initials I won't even mention. And I find it's a bit like quitting smoking: easier to stop altogether than to complicate your life by cutting down. So that's it. Another vice bites the dust.
I'm not altogether happy about losing this one. I miss smoking but, having seen various health complaints vanish since giving up, I'm not sorry I quit. As for alcohol, well, I haven't stopped drinking exactly (wish I could drink far more, in fact), but new-parenting leaves few opportunities to indulge, and that's probably no bad thing on the whole. But cursing has never damaged my health, never interfered with my driving, never sent me to an A&E nor had me ejected from a pub. In fact, for almost 30 years, my relationship with profane language has been nothing short of blissful.
I was in the junior infants school yard when I first heard that noun/verb that starts with F. Eager to try out my new vocab at home, I decided to direct it at some of my elder sisters. They, being patient and responsible individuals, didn't take offence, nor did they laugh. Instead they taught me that this word had special status and should never be used by me, especially in front of my parents - or they'd f***ing well throttle me.
I was a generally obedient child, but this one word was so obviously loaded with street cred that any small boy in a big school would use it at every opportunity, and it gradually became a staple of my schoolboy lexicon. As the years went by, my peers and I revelled in ever-more-inventive ways to drag our discourse into the sewer, and reached levels of expression in "bad" language that were seldom matched in our English compositions.
Philip Larkin wasn't on the syllabus but the only lines of poetry that truly spoke to us were his: "They f*** you up, your mum and dad/ they may not mean to, but they do./ They fill you with the faults they had/ and add some extra, just for you."
As teenagers we were not only ardent users of rude words, but could translate them into numerous foreign tongues. Joyful curse-swapping sessions with the teenagers of Europe turned us - in swearing terms at least - into a band of polyglots.
Curses are blunt, sometimes ugly, often lazily used, but they are not always the enemies of powerful language. In "obscene" speech, nouns can do the work of adjectives ("Get outta that Jaysus garden"), compound words are created to air inexpressible rage (they're not weeds you dug up, they're ger-friggin-aniums), and naturally restrained folk go to great lengths to invent twee euphemisms: "fug", "freakin", "fouled-up", and Ireland's very own "feck" (now a successful export; thanks Father Jack).
You may wonder why such an advocate of coarse language exercises self-censorship in front of his child. Why does he not raise his daughter to curse like a urchin? Feed her a diet of "bathroom words"? Read Roget's Profanisaurus aloud at bedtime? Well, because I'm doing my best to be an exception to Mr Larkin's rule.
Even though "foul language" can be heard several times a day (on TV; at the bus-stop; even, believe it or not, in the Irish Times offices) it retains a shock value in certain contexts.
For her profane utterances, my child would be blacklisted by other parents, expelled from school on day one, and would never get invited to a single birthday party. And besides, to permit curses in official family parlance would rob her of the delicious, seditious pleasure of discovering them for herself.