Jimmy Espy: She said what?

Dalton Daily Citizen

April 19, 2008 10:24 pm

— You have to be #$%@&(^%$^*#@%’n kidding me.
That was my reaction on Saturday when I found out my ticket to today’s Braves-Dodgers game cost $45.
#$%@&(^%$^*#@%, indeed.
Before you write this column off as my annual rant about the price of attending a professional sporting event, please read further. In fact, it is not about the #$%@&-(^%B$@$^*#@% Braves or the %$*&^@$^*@ Hawks or even the &#!&%^#(&#)@^ Thrashers. Though they all deserve it.
It is about my use of #$%@&(^%$^*#@%.
I am a curser, a prodigious curser.
I like to think of myself as a versatile curser, a curser capable of being both brutally blunt and fiendishly finessed.
I am a curser who takes pride in his work — an artist creating in profanity as Monet created with watercolors.
At my profane best, I am a Frank Lloyd Wright of cursers, building never-heard-by-the human-ear-before verbal structures which startle then challenge the human mind.
Then again, maybe I’m just a potty mouth.
That possibility dawned on me the other night when my lovely 3-year-old daughter told me to hand her the “#$%@&(^%$^*#@%’n rubber duck.”
Wah???
She was in the bath at the time playing with her assortment of tub toys and I had made the mistake of setting Friend Ducky on the floor outside the tub.
My daughter wasn’t mad or anything. She just wanted Friend Ducky back in the water with Huey and Gooey (the plastic dolphins) and the rest of her tub buddies.
“Daddy, would you please give me my #$%@&(^%$^*#@%’n duck,” she repeated.
Note the “please” in that sentence. The kid was polite, even if she did also use a word thrown about casually by only Teamsters, Gen. Patton and deep sea crab fisherman.
And me.
Usually I blame my child’s tiny little flaws on her mother or the other kids at her day care. And as much as I wanted to lay “#$%@&(^%$^*#@%’n” at the feet of some 5-year-old from Tunnel Hill, I knew that more than likely my little, nearly perfect angel baby had learned that word from her dear old dad.
The #$%@&(^%$^*#@%’n idiot.
I don’t want my daughter to curse.
Maybe 25 years ago it was something of a rite of passage, a verbal declaration of one’s independence and refusal to accept society’s manufactured norms.
Not now.
Everyone curses. Or so it seems.
Profanity is common in our culture. TV. Movies. Music.
What’s worse, it has become commonplace in everyday life.
When’s the last time you made it through a day without hearing someone curse. A friend. A co-worker. A family member. A kid on the street.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the pope drops an occasional ^&%#@(&)@ in his remarks at Yankee Stadium today.
Then again maybe not. The pope is definitely a senior citizen and older folks don’t curse nearly as much as the rest of us.
They think they were raised better. And they are right.
I’ll give it a try. No profanity.
Cold “#$%@&(^%$^*#@%’n” turkey.

Jimmy Espy is executive editor of The Daily Citizen