Shit,
I have to stop swearing. I’ve been trying to quit since I had my first child a
decade ago. But it’s so hard. Even before George Carlin got in trouble for his
shtick about the seven words you can’t say on the air, I started swearing. When
I first heard curses on the bus to camp, I knew I was onto something big. I
loved their short, sharp crack: fuck, shit, bitch. Still do.

I
heard other great words on that bus: ringworm, 69, nickel bag. I had no idea
what any of it meant, but I wanted it all. I rubbed my arm against another
girl’s ringworm until I sported the round fungal tattoo. I tried to learn what
the naughty words meant and when to use them. Sixty-nine was obvious — that’s
how many minutes sex takes. I didn’t need a nickel bag; I kept all my coins in a piggybank.

Over
time the ringworm disappeared but the explosive power of curses endured.
Swearing became a habit. I’d insert them as adjectives, like Bono’s Golden
Globes comment, “fucking brilliant,” and I’d use them as shortcuts to larger
ideas. In high school and college, even as my actual vocabulary increased —
thanks to SAT prep and the canon — my working vocabulary shrank to a handful
of four-letter words.

It’s
all over now. Since the Janet’s-boob debacle in January, I’ve been under
pressure to clean up my act. Howard Stern is not the only one who has to watch
his mouth. But I don’t have the FCC breathing down my neck, nor do the new
indecency fines — raised recently to $275,000 per infraction per station —
affect me.

I
am up against a far greater foe. My kids.

Unlike the
younger me,
my kids do not dig the staccato music of swears. They tell me they find my foul
mouth to be, well, frankly Mummy, a bit embarrassing.

In
January, my kids got tough. For years they had made a “ding-dong” sound in the
same tones as my car’s warning bell whenever I swore. But with the dawning of
2004, they changed their tack. I’d have to put 25 cents into a “beep box” every
time I used a naughty word. They posted a list titled “healthy alternatives,”
which included “fudge” and “shizzle.” Never one to suppress initiative in my
little go-getters, I supported their idea. Maybe it would even work.

But
it’s worse than Big Brother. It’s nannycam, surveillance bugs, and satellite
spy imaging all rolled in one. They eavesdrop from rooms away and have such
damn good hearing that the smallest whispered “shit” doesn’t go unpunished.
They even approached my husband to narc on me after the little bastards go to
bed.

It
was a coincidence that my kids’ crackdown mirrored the increased FCC
monitoring. But the parallels are there. It’s having the same dampening effect
on my creative flow as it is on television and radio programming. CBS chief Les
Moonves says that in this oppressive atmosphere TV writers are self-censoring
more than ever. Being overly cautious is no way to tell a story. We need a
little room to breathe here, people.

It’s
also hard to operate under vague guidelines. My kids go back and forth on which
words are Kosher and which aren’t; they don’t know the hierarchy of curses.
“The ‘H’ word might be okay,” the 8-year-old said once, “because church people
use it.” But he slapped me with the fine anyway.

The
FCC is perpetuating the uncertainty, refusing to further define the “community
standards” it supposedly seeks to uphold. Local radio talk-show host Brother
Wease says he’s become paranoid since the January crackdown. “We’ve been given
many, many directives,” he said in these pages recently, “some of which are so
vague that I’m second-guessing a million things.”

There’s one
major difference between the broadcasters and me, of course. My audience
doesn’t have a choice — they’re stuck with their longshoreman mother. Radio
and TV fans, however, can switch off offensive programming. It makes sense for
me to stop cursing. It doesn’t make sense for the FCC to create a McCarthy-era
atmosphere on the airwaves all because a woman’s breast peeked out during prime
time. Why doesn’t it go after hate speech? Or depictions of violent acts
against women?

The
beep box has had mixed results. Some days I’m swear-free, others I have to
empty my wallet into the damn thing. As for fudge and shizzle? Please.

The
kids, unhappy with my progress, have just unveiled a new system that might
prove more effective for me and may even serve as a model for the FCC. It’s a
periodic table of swears. Like the chart chemists use, each square in the grid
has a single letter, for example, “S” for shit. The fine for each word is
listed at the top, where the atomic number would normally go.

The
beauty part is that the fines are on a sliding scale according to offensiveness
(the children have done a little research on this). “F” has a whopping fine of
50 cents and “D” won’t set me back a penny. Thus, I have an incentive to tone
it down a bit.

If
the FCC distributed such a chart instead of vague directives, DJs and TV
writers wouldn’t be operating in a fog. More importantly, consumers would have
a better sense of what kind of control the hypocritical FCC commissioners are
exerting. Those shizzleheads.

This article appears in Sep 1-7, 2004.