Around our house my mom and dad used the words 'hell'
and 'damn' like they were 'and' and 'the'. Like 'and' and 'the'.
The kids, however were generally not allowed to curse unless it was
in the context of a good joke or in the case of my mother to repeat
back what she had just said. For example, if she would ask us to,
'clean up our damn clothes' we could ask, to be jokey and sassy, 'all
these damn clothes?' without fear of reprisal. Repeating my dad's
swears to him was right out. You could, of course repeat back my
dad's swears if you felt like you needed a real thorough spanking and
you couldn't figure out how else you could accomplish that. We knew
from an early age that we were not supposed to swear in our own home
much less in public but if mom or dad were not around we were known
to let slip on occasion which many times shocked our friends and
cousins in our religiously conservative community . One time, a
neighbor kid was over helping build the fort and heard me say 'damn'
when a nail got bent and he was visibly shocked. He asked if we were
allowed to swear at our house and I said not technically but we were
not really punished either so, yeah, kinda. He said that his older
sister had been punished earlier that week for saying 'crap'. Now
that amazed me because 'crap' was not even a caution word at my house
and could be used freely.
When we got a little older my brother and I invented a
little game that we liked to play with my mom every time she got
really angry and yelled at us and swore we would run over next to her
and start dancing the running man or something similar by her. Then
we would start chanting, “Go Mom! Say Damn! Go Mom! Say Damn!”
like she was a super star, Vanilla Ice or something. She loved this
game even though she would try and hit us to try and get us to shut up, sometimes
she would even invite further dancing and chanting by telling us to
shut the 'hell' up. Go Mom! Say Hell! Go Mom! Good times.
