The call to curse was strongest in the fifth grade, when my classmates were convinced they had discovered the words and sought to spread them to the furthest reaches of the playground.
Once, while we pressed our noses to the chain-link fence that separated gossip hour and gym class in the agonizingly long minutes before lunch, my friend realized that she had never heard the trendy new words pass my lips.
“Just whisper it to me,” she reasoned. “No one will hear.”
She was instantly proven wrong. A crowd of tweens formed around me, clamoring for me to say the word.
“F-U-C-,” I began, each letter punctuated by a question mark. My friend asked me to say the word, but I could only bring myself to spell it. Thankfully, before I could finish, I was saved by the bell.
I could type the word over and over in this column, but I think my editor might have a heart attack—she knows me too well. I can imagine how gratifying it must be to stub your toe and pierce the air with an expletive yelped at full volume. But the truth is, I’ve never really been moved to curse, even under my breath. Besides, the words never really sounds as they are intended to when uttered with a smile and a giggle, and I know no other way to say them.
There’s really nothing stopping me—my parents certainly aren’t the type to wash out a foul mouth with soap. My father is a columnist who tests the limits of his newspaper’s censors each week. Once, when recounting a botched driver’s exam to my father, I searched to find the right words for my sour instructor.
“What a jerk-off,” my Dad chimed in with an expletive. (What would be the plural form of this insult? Jerkers off?) The question I debated growing up was not whether I could get away with cursing, but how I could make the act feel honest.
I cannot deny this truth about myself when I am at Duke or in my hometown. My sense of self is grounded by friends and family who know me almost as well as I do, well enough to spot a schizophrenic shift in my performance. There is something comforting about this weight, and yet it can be hard to shoulder year after year. We can be anything we want to be, within the realm of who people think we are.
I am convinced that this phenomenon contributes to the Junior-Year Diaspora. The ostensible reason for going abroad is to see sights you can never see at Duke, but that’s not all. In these distant places, we fancy that we can finally flaunt aspects of ourselves that only we see—and the new collection of friends we have selected will be none the wiser.
An opportunity to re-imagine myself arose unexpectedly during study hour with my 6-year-old host sister. Sometimes it takes two to read a novel. Sitting side by side at the foot of my bed, I underline the Spanish words I do not know and Teresita enlightens me with a language that has elements of Spanish syntax but consists mainly of hand puppets and sound effects.
When I was at a loss for the Spanish word for cave, my study buddy shut off the lights, shrieked and approximated the flight of a bat. When I stumbled over the word for concussion, she banged her skull against the headboard with so much enthusiasm that I felt a little guilty.
Yet this study session, there was one phrase that rendered Teresita both mute and immobile. Finally, she leveled with me: “I do not know how to explain it. I think it is a very dirty word.”
After reading the novel, I made a flashcard for the word that had stumped us, as I try to do with all new Spanish vocabulary I encounter. If I could commit the word to memory, master its diverse parts of speech and nail the pronunciation, maybe I could use it convincingly in conversation, I thought to myself.
With eight weeks left in the semester, there’s hope for me yet. Perhaps large portions of what I say will soon have to be bleeped out. You may not want me within 10 feet of your mother come Parents’ Weekend next year.
We are young, not yet set in our ways, and at times it seems we can mix and match parts of our persona to form a new and more appealing whole, if we can only escape those who know better. Yet with each passing day here in Spain, this transformation seems less and less plausible for me. I am slowly realizing that even in the most exotic of environs I am always, irrevocably, myself.
I can introduce myself as Carmen at a bar, stain my lips a shade of red and cuss out any man who looks at me the wrong way tonight if I like. But it doesn’t mean a thing if I don’t believe it.
Julia Love is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every other Wednesday.
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