Curse Free Zone

After hearing my two-year old daughter say, “Who left this crap on the table?” I approached my husband to see if we could make the house curse free, just for a month. Paul’s response? “No fuckin’ way!” Of course, he said this with a great deal of charm and his tongue firmly implanted in cheek but the truth is, asking my husband to stop cursing is like asking Rush Limbaugh to stop being divisive.

Cursing has been a subject that we’ve battled about since Maxwell was born eight years ago. I’ve argued that you can’t ask the kids to not use curse words when you curse in front of them. As progressive as my husband believes he is, he counters with the oldest disciplinary line in the book, “I tell them do as I say, not as I do.” He tells me that he only uses the F-Bomb once in a blue moon and that crap, shit and ass don’t count because they’re in the dictionary.

So, it turns out, cursing is good for you! According to a study in the journal NeuroReport, “…the F word can do more than vent frustration: it can actually reduce physical pain.” The study went on to say that “…cursing reduced the perception of pain more strongly in women than in men.” For the record, I’m not advocating that anyone start cursing away in front of their kids (I have already hidden this issue of Time Magazine away from my husband). But, in the broad spectrum of things, there are worse things we could do.