Dirty Words

By Cornelia



When I was a elementary student at Carmel River School in the early Seventies, one of things I most looked forward in every grade was the day Ric Masten drove in from Big Sur to perform his annual concert in our cafeteria.



In preparation, our lunch tables and benches (covered in pink formica with beige and raspberry boomerangs)


were folded neatly flat into the walls like Murphy beds, clearing the floor for several hundred of us to sit on the linoleum "Indian style."

Ric would take a seat on our tiny stage, settle his twelve-string guitar on his lap, and launch into our favorites from his repertoire--"Palomino," "Pico Blanco," "Evy Ivy Over."

The highlight each year was his "Dirty Word Song," which he'd always preface with a brief lead-in about what makes words seem good or bad. Each verse ended with Ric hesitating before he blurted out a different much-anticipated expletive, all of us at long last shrieking "potty!" or what-have-you right along with him before collapsing against each other in helpless giggles.



What we loved best, however, was his urging us to join him in singing the final chorus, which ended with "the only dirty words are hate and war."



Given my enduring love of profanity, I guess I took his philosophy to heart at that tender age.

Granted, my road to becoming fully adept in the art of gutter language was not always a smooth one. There was the time, for instance, when I referred to fellow-fourth-grader Chris Ashmont as "a homo" in earshot of my mother.

Mom asked me if I knew what that utterance meant, whereupon I patiently explained to her that it was "short for homo sapien," which I mistakenly pictured at the time as a sort of furry and stooped pre-historic-type person one might once have found living in caves.



By high school, however, I had achieved such a breadth and depth of forbidden vocabulary that I rarely made it through hockey practice



without having Miss Marlor yell, "I heard that, Read! Drop and give me twenty," across the field.



Mom still says that the only things she knows her daughters learned in boarding school were how to smoke cigarettes and swear.



Turning profanity into a paying gig took a lot longer. During my brief stint as editor-in-chief "Bunny de Plume" at the now thankfully defunct Bodice.com, I became perhaps the first writer in history ever to lose money writing pornography.



I think this might have something to do with the fact that there's not a whole lot of what the Dixie Chicks refer to as "mattress dancing" described overtly in my novels.


It hasn't stoppered my protagonist's potty mouth, however. Kirkus even referred to my "liberal use of the F-word" in a recent pre-pub review of The Crazy School (in a good way).

Several weeks ago, however, I finally got the chance to talk about bad words non-fictionally for money (woo hoo!) when Bay Area writer Ellen Sussman asked if I'd be interested in contributing to the anthology she's currently editing.

She sent us all the cover art this morning:

Due out in June, 2008

If you'd like to hazard a guess as to which word I chose for my subject, here are some hints: it's pink, starts with "e," and is wedged between "jobs" and "dirty" in the jpeg above. The phrase "nature's applause meter" appears during the course of the essay, if you need another hint.

What's your favorite dirty word? Did you ever use one wrong when you were were a kid?

As for me, I still agree with Ric Masten.

The only dirty words are hate and war.

And I hope the fires in SoCal are brought under control soon--stay safe, you guys!