The Filth, The Fury and The "F" Word

“You made me look like a fool. A ‘GD’ fool!”

I was watching “Driving Miss Daisy” when that “GD” turned up my dim bulb of recognition to 100 watts. Hey, that’s not Jessica Tandy bawling out driver Morgan Freeman for putting on airs – it’s my Grandma!

Geographically and theologically, Daisy Werthan and Marguerite Murphy couldn’t have been further apart. The former is a Jewish Georgia Peach while the latter was a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee WASP. But socially, they were both on the same old school page. They were ladies and there were some things that ladies simply did not do – wear pants, cross their legs or swear. Well, hardly ever. If my Grandma said the word “damn,” you knew she was furious and on the one or two occasions when she uttered “GD” we ran for cover. She’d flirt with blasphemy, but heaven forbid she’d ever commit to it by saying “goddamn.”

As with most things in our culture, each succeeding generation gets a little looser in the morality department. “Damn,” “goddamn” and “Jesus Christ” were bandied about quite a little bit by my parents. You knew supper wasn’t far from being put on the table when you heard the pots and pans falling out of my Mom’s overstuffed kitchen cabinet followed by an annoyed “shit!” My Dad was fond of a “bastard,” “son of a bitch” and, my favorite variation, “son of a bitch on your mother’s side.” But like their parents before them, they drew their own bad taste boundaries and only under extreme duress would they enter into the land of “fuck.” The one time my Dad thoughtlessly spat out that forbidden invective in front of my brother, the engine in his van had caught fire. When The Old Man realized he’d said it within earshot of his son, he looked, as my brother described it, “like a kid who just pissed his pants” and apologized profusely.

Along with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, I’m happy to report that it was my generation who opened up the floodgates of fuck. Or am I?

Don’t get me wrong. Given a bad day, I will think, mutter or bellow “fuck me!” a good half-dozen times. “What the fuck?” is my knee-jerk response to the sublime or ridiculous events I witness on any ordinary day. And if you really want to hear a fuck fest, just put me behind the wheel of a car.

But a few weeks ago, I started wondering if maybe we’ve all gone a little overboard in our overuse of fuck. I was in the company of some friends, being jostled by the cattle run that’s known as Canal Street in New York’s Chinatown on a Saturday afternoon, when I looked up and saw a vendor selling a t-shirt that read, “Don’t fuck with me you fuck I’m from fucking New York.”

Like antibiotics in the face of a drug-resistant virus, it seems to me that our over-dependence on that one, four-letter word has taken some of the power out of the little fucker. It used to be the mother of all swear words, and now it’s just a, well, motherfucker.

So if fuck has lost its shock and awe explosiveness, is there a word today that “dare not speak its name”? You bet. And any woman who considers herself a lady in these here modern times knows which one I mean -- the “c” word (and I don’t mean “cocksucker”). Where “fuck” would have been a Hiroshima-like assault on my grandmother’s ears, the “c” word is Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined to her granddaughter. Say that filthy word in my presence and be prepared for the ugly consequences.

But don’t you fucking dare!

The "Funny" Paper

For years I worked in an in-house advertising agency for a fairly large cable media company. Except for a three-year period when I was given the green light to hire and then fire a junior writer, I was the lone copywriting wolf in a department that grew from one to over half a dozen graphic designers.

Over time, the company itself went from being a very buttoned-up organization to loosening its power tie. “Casual Friday” was expanded to the whole week, so you could wear what you wanted, within reason. But give a creative type an inch and they’ll take a mile, especially the boys who dominated the design department, a large, one-room space that, by virtue of its poster-packed walls and Eau de Locker Room fragrance, I dubbed “The Frat House.”

Out of all the baggy pants wearing, baseball cap sporting yet brilliantly talented miscreants, one of them really pushed the sartorial envelope. Let’s call him Niles. On any fine summer’s day, Niles would come rolling into work around ten-ish, fresh off an early morning surfing stint, with shards of seaweed in his hair, a threadbare t-shirt on his back, ripped up jeans on his backside and a pair of flip-flops on his sand-encrusted feet. Niles took a runner on the department a couple of times, once to do a regional tour with his band, the second time to surf with his buddies in Baja for a month. Although my old boss swore he’d never hire Niles back after either of these “sabbaticals,” he always did. Talent will out.

One day, Niles did leave us for good and ended up taking a gig at, of all places, “The New York Times”! Every time I think of this hyper-creative wise-ass trading in his surfer dude duds for a collared shirt and Dockers, it cracks me up. Niles and “The Grey Lady.” Talk about your odd couples.

Now, if Niles really wanted to work at a paper that would reflect his freewheelin’ style, he should have applied at “The New York Post.” Yeah, yeah, I know. “The Times” is the “paper of record.” It oozes journalistic integrity. It’s what “intelligent” people read. And, it has absolutely no sense of humor. At all. (Also, no comics, and if you read my previous blog, you know this is considered infamia on my part.)

“The Post,” on the other hand, takes pride in publishing the most biased, politically incorrect and downright hilarious headlines I’ve ever laid eyes on. To wit:

Ike Turner dies: “Ike Beats Tina to Death”

Ken Lay is convicted: “Cheato Lay Goes to Jail”

Arafat’s widow grieves: “The Arafat Lady Sings”

Eliot Spitzer caught in a sex scandal: “Ho No!”

and the granddaddy of them all that needs no explanation:

“Headless Body In Topless Bar”

I used to fantasize that “The Post” had one dark-humored misanthrope on staff who was paid big bucks to conjure up these guffaw-inducing gems. Turns out they can come from anywhere – the editorial staff, the readers and, in the case of the infamous “Axis of Weasel” head, a 21-year-old copy boy who was immediately given a permanent cubicle.

Ah well. Guess there goes my dream job.

The Funny Papers

Among the flotsam and jetsam of news items that I randomly pick up on any given day, I could swear I heard of a recent study that suggests children should not be actively taught math or English until they reach the age of six.

This must come as a shock to the parents who frantically wave flash cards in front of their two-months-olds’ adorable mugs, but that sounds about right to me. When I was a kid, there was no such grade as “pre-K” and, even though my house was a few doors down from Merry Makers nursery school, I can’t remember one of my childhood pals who was ever enrolled to play on its swing set or draw with its Crayolas, which I’m sure is about as advanced as the learning curved in that establishment.

Which is not to suggest that we were a bunch of happy-go-lucky nitwits the day we were taken by the hand and tearfully dropped off for our first day of school. In fact, by the time I became a pint-sized pupil in Miss Mulford’s morning kindergarten class, I was a pretty good reader. And I owe it all to the “funny papers.”

While a day doesn’t go by when you don’t hear about the nosedive that the newspaper industry is taking, I remember newsprint’s halcyon years, when delivered to our doorstep was not one, but two, daily papers, morning and evening editions. Best of all, one of those papers, “The Long Island Press,” distributed their full-color comic section on Saturday, as opposed to the traditional Sunday. When that pile of wood pulp and ink showed up around noon, I’d grab the comics like a hungry mutt snatches an unattended roast beef sandwich and fly through the house trying to hunt down a “grown up” who could read me the “bubbles” while I eyeballed the panels of brightly-colored characters and their antics.

My father was working and my mother’s housekeeping duties knocked her out of the box, so that left me with either my two brothers or one of my sisters who, by virtue of being a decade older than me, give or take a year or two, were my usual go-to readers. Whether I had been more bratty than usual this particular Saturday, or they finally became exasperated by blowing a few minutes of their only full goofing-off day entertaining their four-year-old sister (Mass on Sunday!), who knows? All I can report is that I struck out three times, with the final thumbs down issued by one of my bros, who followed it with a rather harsh, “Why don’t you read it yourself?”

After I got over my initial hissy fit, it slowly dawned on me. Yeah! Why don’t I read it myself? I mean, I’d seen my sibs pull enough bone-headed stunts that I knew they weren’t smarter than me. Besides, if I could learn how to read, I wouldn’t have to debase myself to those three teenaged tyrants ever again. I’d be free, I tell you. FREE!

I spent that Saturday afternoon, and a fair share of the ones to follow, hunkered down on the living room floor, picking my way through the “bubbles” until the letters became sounds, the sounds became words and the words became Charlie Brown. Or Broom-Hilda. Or Miss Peach.

Even today, the comics are part of my daily read. The players have changed (Doonesbury, Mutts, Dilbert) but my delight in the low culture fusion of art and words remains the same. In fact, I’ve developed a bad habit of judging someone’s intelligence on whether they do the same. Apparently, so do two of the most powerful and chillingly savvy men to ever dominate the silver screen:

Don Corleone: How's your boy?

Michael: He's good.

Don Corleone: You know, he looks more like you every day.

Michael: He's smarter than I am. Three years old, and he can already read the funny papers.

Don Corleone: [laughs] Read the funny papers...

Yeah. Read the funny papers.

"Me Talk Pretty One Day"

Apologies to David Sedaris for cadging the title of one of his best-selling books for this blog, which is probably skimmed over by tens of people (I can only hope).

If you’ve never read one of Sedaris’ subversively funny yet oddly sweet books of personal essays, get thee to a book store (or, if you’re a cheapskate like me, your local library) and start gobbling them down.

One of the subjects Sedaris comes back to again and again is his large, off-the-wall Greek-American family, which includes his actress-comedienne sister Amy. Being the youngest in an Irish-American brood of five with its own cast of immediate and extended family characters, I can relate. So far, the Bradys haven’t produced any notables like David and Amy, but I’ll bet the constant chatter that bounced off the four walls of our modest family Cape was also echoing throughout the Sedaris family abode.

And it wasn’t only the kids who were running off at the mouth. Houses were small (there were no McMuffins back then, let alone McMansions) and families were large (having only two or three kids meant you simply weren’t doing your part to propagate the Catholic faith). A popular saying was, “Children should be seen and not heard” which, loosely translated, meant: “We need to have an adult conversation now. We have no choice but to have it in front of you, so shut up and don’t interrupt!”

One of the big benefits of this cozy family arrangement was that there was no “firewall” between kid speak and adult talk. We were exposed to a slew of wildly inventive and mildly inappropriate bons mots like, “Get off the table Mabel, the two dollars is for beer,” “I’m hotter than a dog passing peach pits” or “Look who made the Irish sports page” (aka the obituaries).

All of this chitchat instilled in us a love of language that set me off on my writerly way and, I suspect, may have done the same for Sedaris.

Nowadays, I despair not only at the dearth of clan conversation but the dust-on-the-divan quality of it. I guess it’s hard to hold a dishy dialogue when you have four people inhabiting a living room that’s the size of my one-bedroom apartment, or an SUV that could do double duty as Army transport in downtown Kabul. Maybe that’s why I hear “awesome” used to exhaustion or “like” like, a lot.

But I think the final nail in juicy conversation’s coffin is the rabid use of digital and cell phone cameras, not to mention video cameras. Why bother using verbal gymnastics to describe an event when you can simply aim, shoot and upload?

I don’t own a camera, digital or otherwise, or a cell phone (vile contraptions!). What I do own is one helluva linguistic legacy, which is amply demonstrated by the following ditty, courtesy of my grandfather, the late Cecil Murphy:

“My fingers press my only cent,

My mind upon the rum is bent,

But three things I want:


Tobacco, rum, and snuff.


If I snuff I cannot puff,


If I puff I cannot snuff.


Hoping for better times to come,


Here’s my cent, gimme a rum.“

If you ask me, that’s, like, pretty awesome.

Who the Hell Do I Think I Am?

I once heard a sharp-witted commentator on NPR define an expert as “someone who knows slightly more about a subject than you.”

I’d like to refine that dead-on assessment to add “but they get a lot more jazzed about it.”

What subject gets my knickers in a twist?

The English language.

Its use and abuse. Its refinement and profanity. Its rhyme and reason. Its rules and misdeeds. How it swings when you hit the right notes and falls on deaf ears when you don’t.

By now you’re probably thinking, “So how are you ‘slightly’ more expert in the English language than yours truly?” In other words, “Who the hell do I think I am?”

I could bore you with my resume and portfolio*. Or, I could give you the hard-won appraisal of a hard-nosed professional, Sister Helen.

When I was in the seventh grade, there was a school-wide essay contest with the theme, "What Christmas Means to Me." The winner would receive a certificate and have their handiwork read over the PA system.

It was a pretty pedestrian assignment, but Sister Helen was built like an army tank and had an eraser-throwing arm that could have landed her in the bullpen at Yankee Stadium. If one of her students could ace this thing and give her bragging rights around the convent, they'd have it made for the rest of the school year.

I gave it my best shot and handed in my paper. The next day, Sister Helen summoned me to her desk. With forty sets of eyes riveted on my back, I made my knee-knocking way to the front of the classroom, where Sister H. started strenuously quizzing me about the origins of my essay. Had I really written it on my own? With no help from my parents? Sisters? Brothers? I answered truthfully to all queries and must have finally convinced her because her next words were, "Gloria, you are a very good writer."

As the saying goes, "Praise from Caesar is praise, indeed." Since that life-defining day, writing is how I've earned my coin and, I hope, entertained my readers. Whether it's creating advertising for a variety of clients or writing an e-mail to family, friends and the occassional jackass politician, I am, and always will be, a fairly happy ink-stained wretch. However, when I see the obscene piles of money being pulled down by those Wall Street boys, I start to think I should have paid more attention in Sister Ann’s math class.

By the way, I won the essay contest and still have the certificate to prove it.

*www.creativehotlist.com/gbrady2

You didn’t think I’d let slip the chance for a little self-promotion, did you?

What the Hell is This Blog About?

Back in the early Nineties, when the present-day independent film scene was just taking off and the Sundance Film Festival was the place for wool cap-wearing auteur wannabes to shill their latest screenplays, these cinematic upstarts began sporting t-shirts that read, “What I really want to do is direct.”

If I were to create a t-shirt along those same lines, it would proclaim, “What I really want to be is a rock star.”

As much as I admire J. D. Salinger, Ian McEwan, Gore Vidal and Marilynne Robinson, I want to be Thom Yorke, Jack White, Kim Deal and, it goes without saying, Keith Richards.

Who wouldn’t want to ply their trade in front of thousands of screaming fans with sex and drugs as a professional perk instead of sitting in a dark room, staring at a computer screen, with your only audience an overweight cat who occasionally needles you for attention? As for the sex and drugs, well, there’s always internet porn and your umpteenth cigarette of the day.

There is one thing, though, that bridges the gap between the public adulation of a musical performance and the private agony of the writing process – hitting the right key. (And no, I don’t mean your typing skills.)

“Music is what language wishes it could be,” stated Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue.

Think about that for a minute. While the writer sweats, second guesses and loses sleep over the right word and the almost right word (much like I’m doing now), we know that whatever we commit to paper will never elicit the universal, soul-stirring immediacy of a musical piece that disappears into the ether. Blame the hubris of Nimrod as he ordered the building of the Tower of Babel.

Now, go back to O’Donohue’s statement again, but this time, listen to it. Like a small symphony, it compels, it delights and it’s elegant as hell. In short, it’s as close to pitch perfect as words, strung so masterfully together, are likely to get.

Which brings me, finally, to the title of this piece, “What the Hell is This Blog About?” (Keep your pants on, I’m almost finished.)

What I mean to do is give my POV on language wherever it plays itself out – music, books, art, newspapers, magazines, films, TV, advertising, the internet and even what comes out of the Average Joe’s mouth.

In short, I want to have my way with words.

But what I really want is to be a rock star.