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Profanity is a Gift

Especially on the internet. Don’t be afraid of “bad” words.

Zach J. Payne
4 min readNov 10, 2019

Some of my earliest childhood memories involve sitting down with my dad and watching various movies and TV shows that, most parents wouldn’t consider . . . appropriate.

If the movie had either Adam Sandler or Pauly Shore, chances are, I watched it sometime during elementary school. As a family, our regular nightly routine consisted of watching Fox’s evening line-up: Married with Children, Married with Children, The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Malcolm in the Middle, The Simpsons again. Which I started staying up late, I realized that he watched The Simpsons and King of the Hill again after the ten o’clock news. And, as opportunity allowed, we’d watch, as far as I could remember, the only stand-up comedian my father liked: Mr. George Carlin.

Yeah, we weren’t the Huxtables.

Curse words weren’t tip-toed around in our house. Not to say that my parents encouraged and celebrate them — especially when we directed them at them — but my parents weren’t the “wash your mouth out with soap” or “put a quarter in the swear jar” kind of people. They swore — and still swear, seeing as how they aren’t dead yet — regularly, colorfully, and fluently.

They were just words, as our good friend George taught us. Words with certain…

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Zach J. Payne
Zach J. Payne

Written by Zach J. Payne

(He/They) Poet. Thespian. YA Novelist.

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