Change Factors
“…the tongue is for mentioning what is good; defile it not with unseemly talk.” –Bahá’u’lláh
My mother set me down on the steps when I was three years old and talked to me for a very long half hour or more about swearing and what she practiced in her own life and what she expected and hoped for me to practice in mine. I was the youngest of seven children, and most parents would probably have felt there wasn’t time for such a talk. But I remember almost all of what she said and the high standard it set for me—no room for substitute swear words like the one I had just used, “Gee whiz!” No place for others like cheezow, dernit, and other popular words and phrases I heard people using that might call to mind their counterparts in out-and-out curses. But probably the strongest influence was her example and the clean speech of my father. If anyone in the household used such words, I never heard them. I was myself nineteen years old before I ventured to say the word “damn.” Gee willikers!!
I did not, as a child or even as an adult, realize why people did not swear in my presence. I thought that perhaps for some reason I led a “charmed” life. It was as if everyone accepted the fact that I was kept slightly apart and somehow admired and protected. My parents were not protective—I was often allowed to wander recklessly—but I knew I was safe. I had an unusually large vocabulary and used it. I think I learned most of these words from hymns. I could recite the fourth verse, for example, of nearly every song in the hymnal. When I took a vocabulary test, I saw those words and put them into context before choosing another word that would fit into the sentence in my mind. In elementary school, I scored a grade 12+.
But I realize that, to a large extent, an extreme purity of speech set me apart, even as an adult when I thought I had relaxed the stricture. And big brother Danny set a good example, but l think that he sort of kept the athletes he worked with and competed with in the dark about his life when he was away from them. He let no one see his grade cards, and as he never took a book home, he seemed not to be studious. And although he sang in some capacity nearly every Sunday at church and often through the week, no one of them knew he could sing. When he sang a solo at his graduation, his classmates were astounded. And when he sang again at his wedding, they had forgotten and were amazed again. I, on the other hand, was transparent; even my students could read me like a book. Somehow, my colleagues could not.
