Straight out of the gate I want to be very clear about something. The message of this discussion and my preaching on this particular subject is grossly hypocritical. I have zero credibility and not a leg to stand on. You might say everything I’m about to espouse here within is hypocritical af.

Perusing Facebook not long ago I came across a post from my daughter who is currently away at college. It was the kind of random comment that shows up too often in my feed that has absolutely nothing to do with me and was never intended for my eyes. You know, like a week old birthday greeting from someone you barely know to their Aunt Millie in Walla Walla. It was her comment on a meme she had shared with a friend that read something along the lines of, “This is funny af!”

Funny af? I said to myself scratching my head. What is af? Funny as an ant farm? Ants are kind of funny as they hustle about carrying 50 times their body weight in demeaning servitude to their queen. No, that can’t be it. Funny as an Apple Fritter? It could be some Bavarian colloquialism she picked up in Edwardsville, but doubtful. Funny as Antonio Fargas? I always got a kick out of him as Huggy Bear in Starsky and Hutch and he always provided a little comic relief when the action was getting too tense. No, it couldn’t be Antonio Fargas, his best work was well before her time. So what does funny af mean anyway? And then it dawned on me and I disappointedly shook my head and scrolled on. Chalk it up to a world of Buzzfeed, TMZ and Kardashians, I thought. And then I saw her use it a second time.

I’m not naïve; I realize we live in a world where inelegance is celebrated more than intelligence. Reality television for all its dreadful contrived stupidity does provide the useful service of reminding us that we are for the most part, essentially dumb apes demanding attention by seeing who can grunt the loudest. That and the bleep, it did give us the omnipresent bleep. How upset can I be if my child, who is the offspring of a generation that grew up never experiencing the long lost arts of decorum, restraint and civility, chooses to use implied foul language in a public forum? The answer is plenty. Should abbreviated expletives really be dismissed as just a regrettable byproduct of our social media muddled times? Or should they be reviled as mounting evidence of our abbreviated collective intellect? The rapidly evaporating ounce of gentleman left in me says they should be reviled.

We have firmly evolved into a shorthand society where the once celebrated arts of language and the written word are now quaint and painfully gasping antiquities. My super polite son speaks with more grace and refined courtesy than an English butler but his text messages read like the back of a Prince album cover, “R u going 2 the store 2day?” Tack a “girl” onto the back of that sentence and you have a B-side for Raspberry Beret. While this might be efficient communication it is hardly embraceable. And then there’s my little girl who expresses herself beautifully with intelligent thought and passionate opinion, an English major who wants to teach high school kids how to properly speak, read and write, yet here signing off with “funny af.” The problem with this new code, this emoji smattered stenography, is that while you might think adding it to your correspondence comes across as cute and innocuous, your reader interprets the abbreviated slang in full and in your voice. Which suddenly makes your candid contraction appear crass and ill bred.

Think back to the golden age of the Sunday Comics when Blondie’s Dagwood Bumstead would open the closet door and have a bowling ball drop on his head or Beetle Bailey’s Sarge would blow his top. Any combination of punctuation marks in bold print followed by an exclamation would substitute for the forbidden expletive i.e., #@%&! It was taken by the reader as a subtle challenge to use your own imagination to fill in the censored blank. With perverse amusement, I always tried to concoct an invective that would have left Chic Young and Mort Walker blushing. The difference is they left that decision up to me; I didn’t have it forced upon me that Sarge was mad af or Baby Dumpling was colicky af.

Why in my increasing old age do I cling to lines of distinction when all around me those lines are being vigorously wiped away? My parenting style admittedly is founded on the sole tenet of “Do as I say, not as I do.” I’m confident I am not alone in this approach. I implore my children to emulate their mother, to participate, to contribute, to embrace faith and optimism, to live boldly and not to dwell in a void of their own construction. Do as I say, not as I do. This also applies when it comes to cursing. I did not grow up in a home where cursing was sprinkled throughout everyday conversation and I was shocked, even as a teenager when I visited a friend’s home where parents and kids alike used it liberally. I wouldn’t suggest that I never heard it used by my father, unless in anger or pain, but it was not frequent. If your dad could strike his thumb with a hammer and limit his response to, “Confound it, that smarts!” well kudos to him. Once as an adult, on a fishing trip with he and my brother, Dad dropped an f-bomb in a conversational way and I was frankly a little uncomfortable and disappointed. Not because I didn’t drop them myself, though never around my parents but because it was so uncharacteristic and unnecessary. As for my mother, I’ve never heard her curse, period. Certainly nothing stronger than “crap,” which is sort of the family go-to and I think maybe inscribed in Latin somewhere upon the family crest. Fact of the matter is, deep down parents don’t want to hear their children curse and children don’t want to hear their parents curse, at any age. It is instinctually abhorrent.

I am as I said, ashamed of my own fondness for vulgarity, conceding however that at times I find it liberating, refreshing and gratifying. I am too often self-indulgent and weak-willed and my bad language is just further evidence but that doesn’t mean I’ve forfeited my right to correct my own child. Who better than the junkie to straighten out the addict? Think of this post as sort of a scared straight homily from one who knows. Constant cursing is juvenile and revealing. Propriety does not have to be an old fashioned ideal, it is a conception worth salvaging. Relinquishing propriety allows civility to deteriorate into common crudeness and the problem with common crudeness is that it breeds a hostile society.

I watch the old movies I adore and see Humphrey Bogart or Gary Cooper or John Wayne delivering a sock on the jaw to some dumb mug for no other reason than “speaking that way” in front of a lady and I applaud. The fact that I myself often “speak that way” in front of my wife or our female friends is not something I’m proud of. Whether or not in an era of reasserted women’s rights and equality, the notion of adjusting behavior in front of a lady is obsolete, is for me irrelevant. Truth is, like anything that becomes commonplace, I’ve grown rather bored with the concept of open vulagarity. Take away the shame and the naughtiness and it all becomes equally base and unexceptional. I think no matter how much society appears to be pushing for no rules, no mores and no discretion it is ultimately against our nature and we are going to eventually collapse upon ourselves in a heaping clusterfunk of our own discord. Left standing will be the folks who still value the frumpish sentiment of integrity and dignity.

So here is a gentle reminder to those I love that everything you share in the public forum is read and interpreted and private conclusions drawn by your parents, your grandparents, your friends, your acquaintances, your pastor, your priest, your rabbi, your teachers, your current employer, your prospective employer, etc. Also please know that your parents, who love you more than anything in this world, picture their beautiful babies when they read or hear you cursing. It doesn’t matter if you’re 21, 41 or 61 it will always be your sweet, little, beautiful faces we see spitting out such ugly words. So don’t say it!