when did you begin swearing?

very young: older boys on the school bus taught me some "irish"

6-10: dad told me it was ok to swear around my friends, but never in front of mum or sister.

Just now.

my mother blew up the first time she heard me say "fuck" and told me she didn't even want to look at me.

wow congrats Tom, what was the word!?

look i was sure the man on the radio was singing "We're gonna roll this fuckin' convoy/'cross the USA" alright?

6-10. at 6 i wrote "FUCK" in chalk outside our classroom, where we lined up to go back into class after playtime. a little bam called sean skelton grassed on me and i had to go to the headmaster's office. i felt very guilty about it and asked my mum that night, through the bathroom door, if she would still love me if i said a bad word. she said yes so i was satisfied that this was analogous and that i needn't worry. months later it was parents' evening at school, my mum was sick so she couldn't attend, my dad went alone and found out about the incident, he was glad my mum wasn't present as she would have been embarrassed. the teacher remarked that it was at least spelled correctly. my parents didn't get me into too much trouble. i started saying shit and fuck occasionally a couple of years after that.

6-10, but I only started swearing on a regular basis in my early teens.

the teacher remarked that it was at least spelled correctly

lol

21-25, kind of remarkable how quickly i embraced and became fluent in swearing after graduating from byu and dropping out of the cult

I accidentally said "fuck" at age 7. i legitimately didn't know it was a swear.

one day in first grade, we were doing an exercise on short and long vowels, and I got my answer for the word "fork" marked wrong, and I told what my teacher told me the answer was ridiculous, "because then it would be FUCK!". then my mom yelled "NEANDERTHAL ANTHONY, WHAT DID YOU SAY?" and I said "what Mom, I just said FUCK?!"

xpost oh snap - that'd make for an interesting story in itself!

I'm going to guess at 6-10, might have been earlier. I was definitely fascinated by rude words, and I remember learning "caca" and "merde" as a young kid, so I definitely would have been using their English equivalents if I was looking up naughtiness in French.

I mean, I guess "poo" isn't really a swear but "shit" is. Also my brother had a Macc Lads phase and I def echoed some of that in the playground without really getting it aside from that it was naughty and I was so cool for being naughty.

On a regular basis with friends, probably around 11-12.

But my favorite swear word story isn't about me, it's my sister. When she was about 4 maybe, she had a friend over to play, and the friend came running down from her room to tell my parents that my sister was saying "bad words." My mom went upstairs, and my sister was running in circles gleefully chanting "Salvation Army FUCK! Salvation Army FUCK!" There were reprimands, but I think my mom thought it was more hilarious than anything else. It is a treasured piece of family lore. To this day nobody including my sister has any idea where that came from.

thanking u

my close friend's young son at around age 2 or 3 overheard his dad cussing mildly and started saying "WHAT THE HELL?!! WHAT THE HELL?!" one week all the time. his parents just let him get it out of his system.

Last summer I was backpacking and camped near an alpine lake. Late in the day three young men in their mid-twenties arrived and camped about 150 yards away, but sound carries well across water in that silence. For the next two hours I was treated to a nearly continuous course of loud cajolery among them as they set up camp and made supper. They wouldn't shut up.

One of them was particularly fond of 'fuck', so much so that he fit it into every fucking sentence he spoke, often multiple times per sentence and these were short sentences. He wore it like a fucking badge of honor. For two fucking hours. I was so fucking tired of that fuckface by the time he finally crawled into his tent and shut his fucking piehole. I could have wrung his fucking neck.

*rubs chin* i may have had a salvation army fuck now that i think about it...

lol Neanderthal yr welcome. And I feel like my sister's thing must have been something like your friend's son, tho how she stitched those phrases together is a mystery of the universe.

young people who swear artlessly for status points rather than for the artful joy of swearing are easy to pick out imho, and annoying as fuck

or basically, my summer camp experience from ages 9-11

the kids would say shit that made no sense like

"he fucked in my cornflakes!"

or

"stop being a pussyshitcock"

to be cool and subversive.

My dad would often say "aw, shit" under his breath whenever something he was attempting to do didn't go quite to plan. I was around 3-4 playing in the family room in front of my mom and I broke some small, inessential piece off of whatever toy it was I was playing with and said "aw, shit" at a volume I THOUGHT was under my breath but apparently wasn't because Mom turned into a screeching banshee and Dad from that point on started saying "Scheisse" when he was mildly annoyed at something.

but what if you had German friends and repeated what you heard and offended them?!!

this was in MN, he was fooling no one

I legitimately have no idea

most of the swearing I heard were from kids at my Methodist church tbh

I was about ten, I was a rule-following kid who didn't swear at all, but then my cousin started telling these amazing hours-long stories in which a plumber named Billy Ray was constantly getting kidnapped by a gang of bad guys (composed of a green dude who vehemently denied being an alien, a guy who looked and talked exactly like Arnold Schwarzenegger, some businessmen in suits, and some evangelical Christians) and would have to be rescued by his brother Joe, a corrupt, drug-addled cop from New York, and every time things looked bad for Ray he would say "Dayyyum!" and everyone listening was required to say some form of "Damn" along with him. So I was forced to get over my aversion to swearing because I liked the stories.

that's pretty cool! did he ever pursue storytelling as an actual career?

She got her MFA but is really bad about sending things out for publication, so no, not yet. (Looking at my post, I see that my pronouns were confusing; the "he" that you have to say "damn" along with is Billy Ray.)

oh I apologize! *she

Pizza Inn, arcade section, T2: the Arcade Game. age 8 or so? 7? I meant to say "shoot!", but allegedly said "shit!", was made to leave the boy scout pizza party and tell my mom what i said. i wait another 10 years and then starting cursing all the fucking time. i then went on a hiking trip with two of my friends, leading us to a beautiful alpine lake. it was there, with my boys, that i really found my cursed voice

Other (why?): I honestly don't swear much. I have friends where like every third word is fuckin' something or other, and it just makes them sound less intelligent to me. On the other hand, I have English and Irish friends who have elevated it to an art form.

In high school one time I was walking down the hall talking with a friend and casually said fuck about something or other, not noticing that our gym teacher was right in front of us. He turned around and gave me a dressing-down, which was fair enough. But then like a month later someone spraypainted "Fuck" on the batting cage used by the baseball players behind the school, and the gym teacher pulled me aside to ask if I knew anything about it. I didn't and told him so, but what I really wanted to say is, I'm sorry, let me get this straight — do you think I am the only teenager in this town who knows that word?

As a child I was taught not to swear, but mainly as a social courtesy, not under threat of damnation. As an adult I have no philosophical objection to swearing, but it is easy for me to reserve it for those moments when nothing less will fit the occasion.

I probably use any one of the 'big seven' much more frequently on ILX than irl and in my case it's more like three or four than all seven.

Im not judging but id avoid swearing if i can at all help it and somwtimes i do think it doesnt speak well of somebodys breeding if they indulge in it

i swear a lot less now that i live in canada but i was definitely the type of west central scotland inhabitant who uses "fucking" as punctuation and "cunt" whenever referring to an unnamed individual

oh yeah, also the leading "fucking" at the start of any sentence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSwfg_28f5s

I swear pretty often and my mother washed my mouth out with soap more than once, so probably unfair to blame the breeding, deems

aye my mum still gives me shit if i swear in front of her.

my dad too but i don't take him seriously as he swears plenty. when i was a kid he did all his swearing in spanish so that we wouldn't understand him mind you

i guess i've never fully understood the taboo against swearing. it's strongly correlated with religion especially christianity, i think?

it's always seemed so bizarre to me that there are words that are just like deemed off limits because ... [pick from any number of incredibly childish fears]

it's always seemed like one very obvious example of how 'respectability culture' is built on a heap of lies. i mean, i respect the lie where i have to (at work, or when i need to keep things calm and neutral), but other than that i'm gonna say what i feel like. and i don't even swear that much tbqf.

thank god i'm never going to raise children but if i did i think my tack would be "these words will get you in trouble with other people, make sure you know how to modulate yourself according to different situations" and also "some of these words are not great because they dehumanize other people" etc. when i was raised i just remember there was like a slate of words that were off-limits, somehow with "fuck" being the worst one. like, a short word for sex is somehow worse than literally referring to a woman as a dog. okay?

Parents were religious and didn't permit swearing - I think I heard my dad use damn or ass 1-2 times combined by the time I was 18 - which probably contributed to my development as a swearer around non-family in my mid-to-late teens. Now I use motherfucker instead of "um" and "you know." It's fun to say, but I should probably cool it.

Ironically, my dad swears more now than he ever did when I grew up.

'motherfucker' is an objectively beautiful word

And I wouldn't be fond of swearing but when I do go at it, I go at it awful and very hard.

I do have 45 ‘cunts’ in about two hours. I'd have a smatter of ‘fucks’ then, and a maybe an old patter of ‘gobshite’.

And I'd go for probably, I'd have ten more anyway. And I'd get up the following morning and read back ilx and the husband would have the stern eye on.

And I'd go at it again. And there'd be no fucking stopping me. I'd take the shirt off any man's back. Bastards.

Now I use motherfucker instead of "um" and "you know." It's fun to say, but I should probably cool it.

I have a friend who says "fuckin'..." every time he pauses for thought. I find it charming.

"these words will get you in trouble with other people, make sure you know how to modulate yourself according to different situations" and also "some of these words are not great because they dehumanize other people"

This is pretty much how I've approached it with my kids. They've both gotten in trouble (mild reprimands, no big deal) for swearing at school or after-school activities, but only once or twice. With them both being teens now I tolerate a certain level of casual swearing, but I also tell them to cool it when it feels excessive or performative.

my mom dropped an f-bomb yesterday for the first time in like 30 years. I didn't hear it but I knew she had to be in pain cos that's a word she used to never say.

My father was a trawler captain and he himself wouldnt let a curse pass his lips and G*d help the son that let a d*mn or bl*st slip out in front of him and it stuck for each of us

We would, and have, offered physical retribution bytimes to the lower sorts that would utter vilities in the presence of our womenfolk

certainly by 6, because I remember one day my dad and my not-yet-step-mum took me and my sister out for a walk by the river, and I got into trouble because I said 2 swear words. thing was my dad swore a lot, whereas my mum didn't, so I knew these words were rude enough not to say in front of my mum, but I thought they were OK to say in front of dad, because I thought only four letter words were really bad, and one of the words was "bloody" and the other one was "piss" but I thought it was spelt "pis".

I can actually remember the context for both of them too. Well, the piss one is easy, I needed a piss. At one point I tripped and fell on a thistle, and said "bloody thing" because it pricked my hand.

I can't remember how I learned that some words were "bad". My mom had a very serious rule about calling people stupid or dumb, but my folks would use milder curses like damn or hell around the house. Not at each other, just like when they stubbed their toes or whatever. They are gentle people. Which is to say that I don't know how I knew that shit was a bad word, but when I pressed down on the sewing machine pedal while my mom was adjusting her fabric, that's what she yelled, and I was very shocked and afraid. I was probably in kindergarten or first-grade. I didn't hear my parents utter another curse word until the second Bush presidency.

In second-grade, there was this girl Jenny who walked home from school with the group of kids who I walked home from school with. Just your standard group of 7-year-olds loping down the street unaccompanied for a mile or so. Anyway, one day Jenny volunteered with a giggle that her dad called her "shitty britches" when she was a baby. I was so astonished and sad for her, from my sheltered perspective believing this to be evidence of a broken home life. I haven't seen her since, but I like to hope that my assumption was off-base. Both of my kids had definitely thrown their first curse words long before second grade.

The next year, I changed schools and within my first few days attracted the attention of a kid my age who would casually bully me for a few years. One day during that first week while walking home from school, he called me a whore. I hadn't heard that word before so it didn't make sense to me at all. "War? Horse?" I was truly perplexed. Turned out that he actually did come from a rough home. The way he mistreated me and other kids in elementary school must have been a reflection of his family life. Calling your daughter "shitty britches" is one thing, maybe, but how does an 8-year-old know to use "whore" as a put-down? At the time, I was moderately afraid of him and just wrote him off as a total jerk, but I get really sad when I think about him now.

Later that year, I made some friends who were on a steady diet of Guns N' Roses, Motley Crue, and Beastie Boys. I learned many cuss-words and started using them, prolifically. Fuck and shit were my favs though.

When I was six or so, there were two different delinquent boys my age who used to write FUCK on buildings eg. the local warming house for ice skating. I was not sweary as a child, because we were constantly told it was trashy to talk that way rather than there being any religious imperative around cursing. If we said words like ‘fart’, my grandfather (originator of the euphemism ’bull-roar’) would drop the rhetorical question ‘now, what kind of talk is that?’ My best friend’s posh English dad was a master of profanity and we were allowed to swear at afternoon tea as much as we wanted.

My swearing absolutely skyrocketed after my first semester of college and my mom didn’t really push back - in fact, a couple of years ago she and I started calling out various people as cunts in front of my otherwise sewer-mouthed little sister because B would start yelling at us to quit it. Cue me and Mom singing scales using the word ‘cunt’ while my sister plugged her ears and whined.

Addendum to best friend’s English dad’s swearing: after her eldest daughter had spent a long weekend soaking up her granddad’s vocabulary, N had an embarrassing conversation with a nursery school teacher when her girl called someone Very Bad Name. N and I joked that it would take her dad a weekend to fill a swear jar enough to put this child through college.

6-10. We got dictionaries in the 4th grade and I immediately looked up every bad word I knew, underlined them, showed them to all the other 4th graders, and got sent to the principal's office. "But I was just figuring out how to pronounce it right, honest!"

Gotta be 6-10. Just never in front of an adult. Or rather never intentionally in front of an adult.

Adventures in almost swearing:

Sometime when I was in elementary school, my mom overheard me, in anger, calling one of my brothers a whore. And she was all 'WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?' and I was all 'Horror! I called him a horror!' Because I might've had no idea what a whore was but I knew I wasn't supposed to be saying it.

This one...I wish I'd been there but I unfortunately wasn't. When my youngest brother and my sister were youngsters, my brother dared her to cuss. And the cuss word she uttered? 'Bitcher'. Naturally this has since fallen into regular use among my family.

When our daughter was a baby, I’d take her on weekend mornings to let Mrs HD sleep. Usually I’d be hung over, and the “taking” consisted of me dozing on the couch while Baby HD crawled around.

One morning, I was drifting in & out of sleep as I vaguely registered Baby HD attempting the ascension of Mount Dada. She hauled herself up to her feet & tried to climb onto the couch with me. Halfway up, she lost her grip, her strength, or her balance, and crashed to the floor.

But she’s a resilient soul. Again, the insurmountable summit was attempted. I became vaguely aware of a baby’s fist clutching my shirt as she struggled to gain purchase. Again, she tumbled off.

I drifted off to sleep again as she made a third strike at the goal. The struggle was tremendous. Determined. Resolute. Almost achieved, and .... a thump as she failed yet again.

“FUCK.”

It wasn’t her first word, but it might have been her second.

never thought about it too much until my mom started experimenting with swearing in her late middle age -- you could essentially hear the quotes around fucking or whatever she was trying out

don't swear much myself because i prefer to keep my powder dry, but having played a certain level of baseball i feel like i can hold my own with any north american

cannot hang with the britishes/irishes/commonwealthishes and their cunts and twats, tho

There was this British kid in my first grade class who was kind of my nemesis. One day after school the little snitch ran up to my mother and told her I'd called him a "fucking asshole", so before that. My mom gave me a severe tongue lashing in Arabic in front of the entire school.

I got into my first fistfight with that same kid around then. First of very few, but i kicked his wee limey butt.

I had completely forgotten about all of this.

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