As I mentioned yesterday, I had a grand night out on Saturday, and among the diverting and pleasant facets of the night, I met a lutenist (I restrained myself from making terrible puns along the lines of “luter/looter” because I can be mature/not-a-complete-asshole, with some amount of effort). Yon fellow is a great devotee of music, as well you might guess. He plays a lute, for gracious sakes and was volunteering at a chamber music concert. He’s way into that stuff.
So we got to talking, as you do, and he asked me what instrument I play.
I told him that I don’t play anything.
Do I sing?
Not any songs fit for public consumption.
“Well,” he asked me, “how do you express yourself.”
I should have answered, “swearing,” as that is one of my more fluent and vigorous means of self-expression. I’m good at it. I enjoy it. Swearing is fucking cathartic!
I won a cussing contest in college once. Basically, a group of us who lived on the north end of the second floor of Edna Work Hall were bored one afternoon, and were sitting around in Danielle’s room talking about our favored forms of inappropriate behavior, and I began to wax fervent on the topic of cussing. Danielle reckoned as how she was pretty good at cussing, and Jeannie claimed to be a dab hand at the craft herself, so we all sat down and began swapping strings of foul language.
Lo, these many years later, I’ll admit that I won with a bit of plagiarism – I wound up with one of my Dad’s own treasured strings of profanity, a string of blue pearls so glorious as to bring tears to your eye and a stain to your soul.
Goddamn cocksucking, motherfucking, son of a BITCH!
Say it to yourself a couple of times. Doesn’t it have rhythm? Doesn’t it roll beautifully. It’s some Iambic pentameter shit, isn’t it? Damn!
Over the years, I’ve come to really treasure the word “cock.” We don’t use it that much here in the Midwestern USA, so it carries a delightful frisson of taboo…people’s eyes widen a bit when you say “cock,” especially if it’s a female-type who’s speaking of the cock. It sounds good and properly dirty and therefore creates a satisfying stir. It sounds completely raunchier than dick, prick, wang, willy, todger, schlong, tool, wiener, or boring old penis.
There’s a percussiveness to it that makes it ideal to shout when something’s fucked up and you’re pissed off about it. Cock! It’s short, snappy, and to the point.
I feel that it has a sound a bit like those annoying wood-blocks they use in a lot of the oooh-baby type R&B songs.
You know how SNL cowbelled ruined the Blue Oyster Cult for everybody?
Well, I would love to ruin woodblocks the way SNL ruined cowbells, so that the next time you hear some “let’s get it on ’til the break of dawn” type of song, every time that wood block is struck, you hear not “tok,” but “cock.”
(Yes, I know Kanye was completely taking the piss out of the “ooh-baby” type of R&B – brilliant parody, in fact!)
Also: “cock!”
And speaking of my swearing (and also one of my favorite comedians on this planet), Billy Connolly on the philosophy and efficacy of swearing:
Other people who are quite good at swearing are Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie:
Or not swearing, as the case may have been.
Well, just a few more words – or at least one word, repeated repeatedly.
Um. Well that’s about it besides this: I can’t get over how fucking funny the epithet “cock-gobbler” is. I’ve been giggling like a schoolgirl over the phase “cock-gobbler” for about two days solid. It was a popular insult when I was in highschool, and for some reason, it re-infested my brain just recently, and good lord, I can’t hardly think of anything sillier. Cock is, as mentioned above, a gloriously obscene word, and “gobble” and all derivatives thereof are delightfully ludicrous, and when combined into a unified turn of phrase, it reaches a perfect pinnacle of absurdity.
It’s even slightly better than “turd-burglar.” (also, I just discovered, just now, that “turd-burglar” is in the spell-check.) So is “turd bungler,” in case you ever needed it. I can’t spell burglar worth a shit, in case you were wondering about that, too.