Washing your mouth out with antibacterial liquid soap.

I was driving to school today and a song on the radio had a chorus that repeated over and over, "I'm just #%&@ing everything up." I'm the first to admit that I've felt this way from time to time, but it's not really the kind of thoughtful sentiment that I'm used to getting in alt rock. It also reminded me of a discussion a few of us were having recently about the increase in the amount of foul language that we've been hearing around.

When I worked in advertising, it was rare to hear a sentence spoken without some kind of profanity. It was just the way everyone talked and I kind of liked it. And I'll even admit that my inner dialogue has a fair share of unprintable words. But I decided quite a while ago that using swear words indiscriminately is just laziness.

An easy, quasi-swearish example is "sucks." Now let's ignore for the moment that this particular non-leech-related use of the word is a reasonably graphic reference to oral sex. What really bothers me is how when you start using it a lot, it becomes generic in meaning, like "is very bad." And when you use it repetitively you lose all the nuance available to you when you insult something or someone. In the books of famous great quotes, there are probably more insults than anything else. When that woman said to Churchill accusingly, "Mr. Churchill, you are drunk!" and he replied, "Yes madame, and you are ugly. And in the morning I will be sober," it wouldn't be nearly as interesting if he'd replied, "You suck." And calling someone an a-hole isn't nearly as interesting as calling them a snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings.

When you substitute one word for many available words or expressions, you cheat yourself and whoever's listening. It gets repetitive to the point of losing its meaning. It's fun to listen to those people on "Jersey Shore," who operate with a vocabulary of about the same breadth as Go Dog Go, but you probably don't want to talk like them. So I guess my objection to profanity is that it encourages lazy thinking, but almost as bad as that, it's boring.

On a personal note, when I feel the need to genuinely swear, I take my guidance at home from the father of Jean Shepherd, writer and narrator of "A Christmas Story." This is from his (fantastic) book of depression-era vignettes, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, on which the movie was based.

My father was always a superb user of profanity, but now he came out with just one word, a real Father word, bitter and hard. "DAMMIT!"