"And your favourite swear word is...."

I can almost hear the AI interviewer asking a question like that.

One of the more outrageous columnists has a piece about swearing in the paper this morning. He looks at it as history and how attitudes towards it have changed.

I grew up in a family where swearing was unacceptable. Nobody I knew swore the more serious swear words. I am not sure I even knew they existed.

I remember a lesson the Senior Cat taught us when I was in the last year of primary school. He was my teacher as well as my father. My mother was the only other teacher in the school. One of the little ones had rushed up to my mother in the playground because another child had fallen and was bleeding. "He's got a bloody nose!" 

We had the lesson explaining how, in that context, "bloody" was correct. It was not swearing. The Senior Cat had some bemused parents asking for an explanation after church on the following Sunday morning. That most of the men would undoubtedly have sworn frequently did not stop the need for an explanation. 

Words like "damn" and "blast" were considered unacceptable in my childhood. There were more words my brother and I had heard around the docks of course but we did not understand them. We did not use them. Mum would have washed our mouths out with soap and given us a belting with the strap. 

I was in my mid teens when I heard my grandfather swear. Grandma and I were hanging out the washing. Grandpa was some distance from us chopping wood. The head of the axe suddenly flew off and landed near Grandma's feet. It gave her a start and it was much too close for Grandpa. He made a sound I had never heard before. Grandma had never heard it either. She had grown up on a farm and I am certain her father and brothers swore. I remember we looked at each other as Grandpa picked up the axe head and began to apologise over and over again. I remember Grandma saying, "It's all right Ben. It didn't touch me." 

That was not the reason for his distress. He had apparently used a swear word. That the word was in Gaelic. We did not understand it but it still distressed him. His parents had spoken Gaelic. His father was a sailor, ship's pilot and marine cartographer. No doubt he had been surrounded by swearing in more than one language. Grandpa though did not swear. My great grandmother would apparently have had something to say about it if her children had said anything unacceptable.

I thought of this again years later. I was working in a school for children who were physically and intellectually disabled. There was one child who was verbal and often uncontrollable. Her family background was German. One day she swore at me in German after having been told off for swearing in English. I told her I understood and did not like it. She then went on to swear at me in Italian and what I suspect was Maltese. I told her each time I understood. Finally she looked at me in a puzzled sort of way and said, "I not swear then." She never swore at me again but I sometimes wondered whether I should have allowed her to go on swearing to ease her frustrations.

Still later I came across a very frustrated profoundly deaf boy. I was crossing his schoolyard when he came out of a doorway backwards. He was using some very graphic signs at his teacher when he bumped into me. The transformation from absolute fury at his teacher to his horror at having been seen swearing in front of a woman was startling. He signed "sorry" and fled. His teacher let him go. "He will come back and apologise to me too. I would rather he did that than lashed out."

And perhaps that is the important thing. I don't feel a need to swear but if saying something like that helps someone not commit violence then it matters.

It was years later that the Senior Cat was putting up a bookshelf when it fell over close to where my then very young nephews were playing on the floor. He said "Blast". I remember the older nephew looking at the younger one in a slightly bewildered way and then saying "Papa swore." Their own father swears but they knew the Senior Cat did not...unless the bookcase fell over and might have hit them.