It appears that in the crunch of moving, I didn’t cross-post my last entry with kick-ass entity Erik Medhus over at Channeling Erik. Here you go!

http://www.channelingerik.com/assholes-need-love-too/

I was just thinking of Erik this morning, when I realized that all of my favourite podcasts have a good deal of cursing in them. I was thinking, “What do I associate with swearing? Why do I like it so much? Is it honesty? Open emotion? Is it the community in which I was raised? (North Bay is a sort of redneck / swarthy French Canadian town. Kids learn to curse in two languages.)

You know what else is interesting? I’ve picked up some basic phrases of Nuu Chah Nulth while living here on the coast these past 7 years. (Nuu Chah Nulth is the original language of this region, and thanks to hard-working and determined community members, this language was not lost during the genocide and is starting to come back.)

I know “chuu” (until we meet again) and kleco kleco (thank you) and a few other phrases thanks to the local language osmosis effect and the radio broadcasting language education once in a while. But I haven’t learned any Nuu Chah Nulth swearing, assuming that the language has the same pattern of segregating certain words as taboo.

It’s interesting to think about just the words being segregated and labelled as rude, rather than addressing the actual thought / intention / rudeness / heart of what was actually said. On one hand I’m thinking “of course all language has curse words, right?” But on the other hand, why would that be? And what would it look like if all the cursing Erik could do would be to say “Bless your heart!”

I’m going to have to ask one of my friends, I think I know just the guy to ask, too. I’ll let you know what he says.