“I almost blew a nut,” my glistening husband said after a particularly grueling spin class.
After working as an engineer in a factory environment for almost 30 years, my husband’s vocabulary is peppered with gems just like this.
Like today, I texted him a video of a couple of male house sparrows MMA fighting over the deed to a yellow bird house attached to our back deck. It’s the mansion on the hill, so to speak, with its freshly painted exterior and vaulted ceilings.
The battle was car-crash riveting in its rawness; I was certain it was going to end with a splattering of fresh bird blood, pecked-out eyeballs, and a flurry of feathers from broken wings on the freshly fallen snow.
“Just like Trump and Biden whipping out their dick swords. Food and shelter is always something to fight for in nature,” he texted back.
Dick swords?
The monotony and physical demands of the factory environment seems to foster in its workers a flair for spicy language that is direct, honest and electric. It sizzles.
I regret not collecting these precious gems in a notebook for future reference. Like hearts (or dicks) drawn with fingertips on a sandy shore, the phrases are erased by the waves of time.
But it’s not too late. My husband still has several more years on the factory floor, so I figure I can fill at least a few notebooks with these colourful sayings usually referencing male genitalia.
I’ve always had an appreciation for the spicier side of language. From the moment I donned my first training bra, profanity embedded itself inside the mitochondrion of my well-being. To sanitize my language, would be to castrate my wildness and dam the river of my chi energy.
When I was a teenager, my mother told me that I took after my great, great uncle Christian, a potty-mouthed Danish sailor who descended from Vikings. Is that why they named me Christina? Who was I to argue with my mother? I embraced my inner Viking and continued to add fresh blasphemies to my vocabulary.
I was also told that swearing is a sign of weakness. My parents don’t swear. My mom is 85, and I’ve never heard her curse. My dad says ‘shit’ on occasion, but it always feels wrong. Kind of like Tom Hanks cast as a serial killer.
Is swearing a sign of weakness? I pushed a couple of babies with bowling ball sized heads through the birth canal sans medication. During the inaugural birth I ripped open like a fresh bag of Cheetos, and the one thing that got me through it was profanity: I howled ‘FUCK!” over and over and over until the inferno between my legs just smoked and there was a wet, wailing baby on my chest.
While in my altered state of agony, I was still lucid enough to realize everyone in the room was uncomfortable with my chainsaw loud, repetitive ‘fucks’. They heard me down the hall and softly closed the door. Going feral makes the people around you feel awkward and alarmed. Too bad. Shout your barbaric fuck into the world. In the process, you might birth something beautiful.