The Seven Words You Can't Say

            In His Will and Testament, Bahá’u’lláh wrote:  “The tongue is for mentioning what is good.  Defile it not with unseemly talk.”  A few weeks ago, my sister and brother-in-law came back from a golfing trip complaining about the foulmouthed boors, both male and female, out on the links.  Being no strangers to colourful descriptive adjectives themselves, I tried listening to what their actual beef was.  They set out the perameters of when and how much was appropriate for one to swear.  One of my brother-in-law’s arguments was that one is entitled to use purple prose when angry or outraged for emphasis, but in casual conversation it is just bad manners. A delicate distinction to be sure.  It reminded me of the late comedian George Carlin’s query:  “Why is everyone who drives faster than me a maniac, and everyone who drives slower an idiot?”

            (I once listened to George Carlin deliver the exact same routine on cable television that I had once heard him do on network.  Exactly the same, that is, except that the cable one was spiced and seasoned with an absurd amount of superfluous obscenity, which didn’t make it one whit the funnier.)

            But I have a reason to be indulgent with salty parlance.  In the summer of 1976 I was working a summer job at the pulp and paper mill where my father worked for a quarter of a century.  We went together early, before sunrise, but since his shift started half an hour before mine, I would go a corner of the lunch room with my copy of Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, turn on the light, and read.  There were grumblings from grizzled overalls hunched over their coffees, and one morning one ursine growl wasn’t taking it any more, rose up and rumbled my way.  Suddenly out of nowhere Paddy Smith, at once the most gregarious, glossolarily challenged and unimaginative of men, swept in and grabbed the Kodiak by the arm, and shouted (and I quote) “Sit your effing a** down!  That’s effing education, man!  He’s not going to effing be an effing bum like us!  He’s going to effing do something with his effing life!”  Not only was his heart in the right place, his courageous speech is engraved in my memory much more clearly than any but the opening lines of Richard III and five out of the six soliloquies of Hamlet.