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Expletive deleted

By PAT WICK

© Another Day in the Country

"I wonder if my language usage will eventually change," I said to a friend of mine the other day as we lamented hearing murdered English tenses. "Will I start saying 'ain't' and not even notice?"

"I've lived around it for 50 years," Betty, the former school ma'am said with a grin, "and it hasn't affected me."

"You're probably right," I answered, somewhat subdued, "after all, my worst language habit has nothing to do with syntax and everything to do with expletives." Expletives which I brought with me from California, I might add, as a later-in-life bad habit.

I do not come from a line-up of women who used swear words. If my grandmothers said anything it was usually in German. "Sock-fulla-katza," my Grandmother Ehrhardt would say if she hit her thumb or was just exasperated.

"Auch-du-leiber-gott" (or something close to that spelling) my Great-grandmother Schubert would mutter as she lowered herself into her rocker.

"Us kids would say 'dangit anyhow'," my mother recalls. "We were allowed to say dang and darn but not damn it." As an adult, however, and eventually a preacher's wife, all slang was purged from my mother's vocabulary. And she wished for her daughters to emulate her good behavior.

I never used expletives but I did use slang in my youth. "Holy cow," was my retort of choice as a teenager and the minute I said it, Mom would begin her lecture. "Scripture says that our speech should be yea, yea and nay, nay," she'd begin and I would grin at her and say, "yea, yea, nay, nay." She would then give me that look which meant, "Patricia, you know what I mean!"

"You know, I didn't even know my husband cussed," Betty said the other day, "He never used any expletives in the house. That was just his rule. One day when I heard our little boy using some words — I had no idea where he'd picked them up — I listened more closely and heard all the things his daddy called the tractor!" she laughs. "That was quite a revelation."

"One day I heard some boys trying out all the swear words they knew as they stood on the street corner," Frances added, "and I went straight home and told my teenage son that if he ever got the urge to show off like that to never do it in front of ladies. That kind of language was 'barn talk'."

So, now I'll confess. The expression that I misuse is "my gawd." It isn't meant to be sacrilegious but it certainly sounds that way. I lean on it like a bad crutch! I use it randomly to express horror, wonder, incredulity, and amazement. Since, in my head, it's spelled gawd (lower case) and not God (upper case) I forget it's an expletive or could be seen as barn talk. It needs to become expletive deleted, since I use it more than our buddy Tool-time Tim uses any such word — in our presence, at least.

Triple T does have a vernacular I call "quarry talk." I hear it when he reports something that happened at work. It consists of a whole bunch of expletives sandwiched between a verb and a noun. "It's what guys understand," he explains to me. And he's probably right.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I realize that my own ears have gotten numb to expletives. I've just tuned them out — even that chronic one that comes from my own mouth all too frequently. Perhaps, I need to join an expletive support group to whom I am accountable. Now that our neighbor girl, Emily is a teenager, she doesn't hang around my house as much and call out "ka-chink" when I say the wrong word.

It's another day in the country and I guess you will have to be my support person. If you hear me say, "Oh, my gawd," just holler out "ka-chink" and I'll pay you a quarter. Eventually, I'll learn. Somehow we have to get that expletive deleted. (Mom, are you reading this? You might make a mint!)

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