mystmarimatt

My mother is a third-and-fourth grade teacher, and she has the mouth of the sailor. That doesn't mean she uses it in front of her students. I cuss a lot, my brother cusses a lot, as does my father.

But that doesn't make it acceptable in an academic setting. I had a teacher in high school, my favorite teacher, who always demanded a 'vocab restate' if we cussed in class. I always sort of enjoyed it. On the other hand, my high school theatre teacher always "forgot to hear it" if we accidentally cussed during rehearsal. The first time I said "Fuck" in a college course, though, I jumped, before realizing that nobody cared. But I haven't done it since.

I guess my feeling on this isn't that it's "rude," or "unacceptable," or "Inappropriate," but rather, I realized after that first slip, that cussing in an academic atmosphere doesn't exactly do anything to raise the level of the discourse.

I don't want to participate in any class where "This book was a fucking piece of shit, because it was bad" is somehow considered a valid argument or viewpoint in literature, or in any subject, really. There are more intelligent, articulate ways to express your opinion. Besides, you can be just as mean, if you want to, using different language. That's the beauty of language, there are crueler things to say about something than "it's a piece of shit."

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Words of Wisdom:

If you could really get to know someone and know that they weren't lying to you, then you would know the world was real. Because you could agree on things, you could compare notes. That must be why people get married or make Art. So they'll be able to really know something and not go insane.