"Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

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I got to thinking about dirty words this morning when I woke up and looked at the clock, realized I had once again overslept, and said a popular dirty word that begins with “S,” which will hereinafter be referred to as “the S-word.”

I say the S-word every morning when I look at the clock, because I’m always angry at the clock for continuing to run after I’ve turned off the alarm and gone back to sleep. What we need in this country, instead of Daylight Savings Time, which nobody really understands anyway, is a new concept called Weekday Morning Time, whereby at 7 A.M. every weekday we go into a space-launch-style “hold” for two or three hours, during which it just remains 7 A.m. This way we could all wake up via a civilized gradual process of stretching and belching and scratching, and it would still be only 7 A.M. when we were ready to actually emerge from bed.

But so far we are stuck with this system under which the clock keeps right on moving, which is what prompts me each morning to say the S-word. The reason I raise this subject is that this particular morning I inadvertently said it directly into the ear of my son, who is almost four and who sometimes creeps into our bedroom during the night because of nightmares, probably caused by the fact that he sleeps on Return of the Jedi sheets with illustrations of space creatures such as jabba the Hut, who looks like a 6,000-pound intestinal parasite.

I felt pretty bad, saying the S-word right into my son’s ear, but he was cool. “Daddy, you shouldn’t say the S-word,” he said. Only he didn’t say “the S-word,” you understand; he actually said the S-word. But he said it in a very mature way, indicating that he got no thrill from it, and that he was merely trying to correct my behavior. I don’t know where kids pick these things up.

Here’s what strikes me as ironic: When I said the S-word this morning, I was in no way thinking of or trying to describe the substance that the S-word literally represents. No, I was merely trying to describe a feeling of great anguish and frustration, but I’d have felt like a fool, looking at the alarm clock and saying: “I feel great anguish and frustration this morning.” So in the interest of saving time, I said the S-word instead, and I got a condescending lecture from a person who consistently puts his underpants on backwards.

The other irony is that for thousands of years, great writers such as William Shakespeare have used so-called dirty words to form literature. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the following words appear in Act II, Scene VI, Row A, Seats 4 and 5:

“O Romeo, Romeo. Where the F-word art thou, Romeo?”

Today, of course, it is considered very poor taste to use the F-word except in major motion pictures. When we do use it, we are almost always expressing hostility toward somebody who has taken our parking space. This is also ironic, when you consider what act the F-word technically describes, and I imagine you psychiatrists out there could drone on for hours about the close relationship between sex and hostility, but frankly I think you psychiatrists are up to your necks in S-word.

What I think is that the F-word is basically just a convenient nasty-sounding word that we tend to use when we would really like to come up with a terrifically witty insult, the kind Winston Churchill always came up with when enormous women asked him stupid questions at parties. But most of us don’t think of good insults until weeks later, in the shower, so in the heat of the moment many of us tend to go with the old reliable F-word.

I disapprove of the F-word, not because it’s dirty, but because we use it as a substitute for thoughtful insults, and it frequently leads to violence. What we ought to do, when we anger each other, say, in traffic, is exchange phone numbers, so that later on, when we’ve had time to think of witty and learned insults or look them up in the library, we could call each other up:

You: Hello? Bob? BOB: Yes? YOU: This is Ed. Remember? The person whose parking space you took last Thursday? Outside of Sears? BOB: Oh, yes! Sure! How are you, Ed? YOU: Fine, thanks. Listen, Bob, the reason I’m calling is: “Madam, you may be drunk, but I am ugly, and...” No, wait. I mean: “You may be ugly, but I am Winston Churchill, and ... “ No, wait. (Sound of reference book thudding onto the floor.) S-word. Excuse me. Look, Bob, I’m going to have to get back to you. BOB: Fine.

This would be much more educational than the F-word approach, plus it would eliminate a lot of unnecessary stabbings. On the other hand, to get back to my original point, we really ought to repeal any laws we have on the books against the S-word, which should henceforth be considered a perfectly acceptable and efficient way of expressing one’s feelings toward alarm clocks and cars that break down in neighborhoods where a toxic-waste dump could be classified as urban renewal.