Thoughts

One of my favorite things about PNN is the opportunity it affords us to think.

Among the very talented writers that post here on PNN we have a wide variety of experiences, ages, backgrounds, cultures, and lifestyles. We can skip from post to post and find every representation of life from student to teacher, single and loving it to looking for a life partner, parent to child-free, homebody to world traveler... and all the combinations in between. We may not always agree with a point of view -- we may not always enjoy another person's writing -- but we are free to choose what we continue to read.

There have been a flurry of posts recently about swearing, with lots of comments on each new piece. I've caught myself thinking about each point of view at random times during my day -- while walking across the playground to my "Duty Zone" for yard duty, while stirring a pot of pasta cooking on the stove, while showering or falling asleep or vacumming or whatever mindless task I am currently attempting to liven up with an internal conversation -- and I decided to chime in with a post of my own.

First of all, I have to confess I do swear. Not all the time, and not in front of the kids (15 years of being a nanny will give you the same skills Gretchen mentions in her post about being a dee-jay) but I do swear on occasion. I recognize the punch factor of a well-chosen word in context, and will use it if appropriate. 

Occasionally I will do a self-check and realize I'm swearing more than I would like, in a gratuitous or mindless way; not like a drunken sailor on shore leave, maybe, but enough that I decide to scale back the dependence on the George Carlin list a bit.

WearsManyHats said she gets turned off by written swearing, and that a post full of swearing is likely to make her not want to read further. She's honest about this, and she's introspective enough to realize this may prevent her from seeing/hearing some points of view. When I read her post, it seemed to me that she meant a lot of gratuitous swearing -- not the occasional hot damn, but the whole enchilada doused with flaming f-bombs. I agree; at some point the punch factor of a well-chosen swear word loses its power to invigorate and instead becomes redundant and annoying. It's like the toddler "NO!" phase, where they answer no to every request as a matter of course, even when they WANT whatever you're offering... sort of reflexive, rather than effective.

The great thing about this post-flurry is that it made many of us stop and think. We thought about how we feel about swearing, and communication in general. We thought about how our communications are received, and how we feel about that. We explored the thoughts that came up from reading the posts, and then from the comments from other readers. In short, we took a moment to do some evaluations, and came away with a better understanding of our own thought processes as well as an insight into our fellow PNN posters' thought processes. How cool is that?

I, for one, am grateful for the nudge PNN gives me -- nearly daily! -- to think, to learn, to grow, to explore.

Just a thought...