From a boy’s perspective, cursing and insults are parts of your
childhood. You first hear them from much older boys who say
them out loud, and then you slowly learn them, make them
your own, until such a day, that they are a stable part of your
everyday vocabulary. This goes on for quite some time, most
evidently in teenage years. While I was being taught all the
variety of curses and insults in the Albanian language (I must
say I was a very eager student), I also realized that no matter
how important these curses were in our vile childhood/borderline-teenage years, we should never – in any circumstance
whatsoever – use them in front of the grownups, or girls. In our
eyes, those words were ours to use, and no one else’s. Also, no
one else should know we use them in the first place. I was in
fact unclear as to why we all followed this particular rule so rigorously, but of course I followed it, and I always thought “Who
am I to question it?” until one day…
It was the day – not sure when and how old I was – I heard my
dad curse for the first time, in my presence. That’s when it hit
me, and I first realized: Everyone curses.
The walls of everything I knew, everything I held for granted,
were shattered in front of my eyes. The illusion we were being taught (or rather self-taught) of those nasty curses which
shouldn’t be uncovered to anyone else, came to be false and
deceivable, as I quickly came to realize it wasn’t just my dad,
but everyone – my 4th floor neighbor, the blonde girl in the last
row, the tired-looking shoemaker in my neighborhood – that
used these curses, on daily basis even.
I was indeed curious and interested as to why we couldn’t
use our (almost everyday) curses in front of grownups or girls,
since for us (boys) those words were pretty natural, but as I
said earlier, I didn’t take the guts and the time to question it.
It was with the passing of years that I realized that everyone’s
problem was not with the curse, but with the socially-unacceptable/dirty words that were used in those curses. I came
to understand this after I realized that other curses, which
were not comprised of the same “negative”, “dirty” and socially-unacceptable words, were very commonly used, in front of
whomever.
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