I Swear To God
Hey, swearing and crude talk is everywhere. And it’s on the upswing, Jackass Jimmy Johansson. Jesus, if you watch the HBO series Succession, all they do is swear. The F-word is the favorite with those crazy bastards.
A survey done in 2022 found that Americans on average swear 21 times a day. That’s it? What the Christ? I swear a lot more than that. It sounds like the better educated people are the ones who swear the most. I can’t put myself in that class. It took me six years and five schools to make it out of high school.
Some therapists think swearing is therapeutic. My mother did. She never drank, even with eleven wild Irish kids to raise, but she swore like an ironworker. Must be where I got it.
I ran into a situation here at the office once. I didn’t realize that one of our art directors was a minister on the side. One day he pulled me aside and asked me what I was going to do when I met my maker. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “How the hell do I know? I guess I’ll say hi to God and shake hands.” He told me he didn’t think that meeting was going to go well for me.
You know what he did next? He pulled out a pad and showed me where he marked down every time he heard me take the Lord’s name in vain over the past week. Looked like about a thousand marks. So I said, “For Christ’s sake, if you put as much effort into your work as this goddamn tally, maybe I wouldn’t swear so much. Advertising is a tense, stressful, deadline-driven business. Swearing takes the edge off."
But who knows, the art director/minister may be right. When I meet the big man, he might put me on the next elevator down.
Keep your dukes up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o_IgdDxwko
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