For the vast majority of her life, my Great Aunt Daisy despised the idea of swearing. She came from a very conservative Scottish background, and swearing was simply out of the question. A lady would never, ever, under any circumstances swear. So prim was Daisy that if she were to overhear you say you were sweating, she would admonish you, hissing, “Horses sweat, men perspire!” She could be a bit of a buzz kill, my Great Aunt Daisy.
However, all of this changed a few years ago when suddenly, now in her mid 70’s, she embraced profanity.
My family had been invited over to her and her (second) husband’s home for dinner, and as was their custom, they fought and bickered over absolutely everything. This went on and on, escalating to a pitch of near madness when they started to battle over what the proper knife was to use when carving the turkey. And suddenly, out of nowhere, in her unflinching Scottish brogue, Daisy shouted,
“ EDGAR, WHY DON’T YOU JUST GO SIT ON A FUCK!!”
And then her face flushed, she stormed off to her sewing room. Edgar pretended that nothing had happened, began a long recitation of each of the cars he had ever owned in his life, while from the sewing room, where Daisy remained for the rest of the night, we heard the angry efforts of her Singer sewing machine.
This was a revolution, and it was clear that it emancipated my Great Aunt in many ways. She felt good about it, empowered, and from that point forward, as if to show the world that she was no longer going to take it, she began to swear. But the thing was that she really didn’t have a clue how to swear. She’s never had children, nor had she ever had friends who might swear, and over the course of her life had immediately blocked out any culture that might contain profanity. Although she knew that FUCK was a bad word, she didn’t really know how it should be used, or what it exactly, it’s multiple meanings were. In her mind, the word was bad, and it could be used in any context, appropriately expressing her intensity of feeling.
These are a few of my favourite applications that Daisy had for the word FUCK.
1. After her husband Edgar had roughly tossed their cat out of his chair, Daisy yelled at him, “Yeah, you’re a real big man, Edgar, why don’t you just go out and cut down a FUCK tree!”
2. One day I made an inappropriate joke about people with mental disabilities, forgetting their Daisy’s half-sister, who had passed away a few years earlier, had Down Syndrome. This upset Daisy, who turned to me and said, “Oh, aren’t you a funny man, a real FUCK clown, you are!”
3. One night while watching American Idol with Daisy on the sofa after dinner, Simon Cowell gave a lacerating critique of David Archuleta, her favourite contestant, to which Daisy said, “Oh, well I guess Simon got up on the wrong side of the FUCK this morning!”