Sugar Honey Iced Tea

In partnership with

New feature alert! I’ve added a section at the end called It’s Good and I Like It, where I’ll recommend… things! Things of all kinds. Got a thing you think I’ll like? Send it my way.

My senior year of college, I got lucky: John Barth—the preeminent postmodern novelist who wrote Lost in the Funhouse, Giles Goat-Boy, The Sot-Weed Factor, and a ton of other books that are rather fun, if your idea of fun is letting complex language and stories-inside-stories turn your brain inside out—accepted me into his graduate fiction workshop.

I don’t know how he was persuaded to allow me in, but he did, and this was the kind of workshop you dream of. Once a week we’d gather in Gilman 500, a cozy, isolated room inside a clock tower that gazed out on the upper quad, which grew greener week by week through the spring. There were twelve grad students, who all seemed so grown-up and experienced (one of them was ZZ Packer), and there was me, a slovenly, arrogant, tactless little shit who thought he was better than everyone.

Most important there was Barth, a trim, older man, with a close-cropped white beard and a smooth, arcing bald pate. He had been teaching at Johns Hopkins for nearly 40 years at that point, and it felt like it: not that he was tired but that he was practiced, that he knew where he was going to lead us during each three-hour seminar. He’d seen all kinds of writers, and knew how to handle them, and enjoyed his mastery of this domain, parallel to his mastery of writing itself. Unfortunately, I can’t remember any particular advice he gave us about writing, but I do remember he swore beautifully.

What made his cursing so powerful was that it was rare. He didn’t punctuate every other sentence with a fuck, or casually describe a student’s attempt at narrative as bullshit. Instead, he seemed to allow himself a single curse word per workshop, and we students never knew what it would be or when it would drop. But when it did, it landed hard—a thunderclap cunt to shake the room and wake the drowsy, a gregarious cocksucker to open our eyes and drop our jaws. If I learned any lesson from Barth, it was this: Words have weight.

Like most American boys, I learned to swear early and often. Technically, I learned in England, where I lived in Brighton the year I was eight. One day, at recess—which my British friend M. tells me they call “playtime”—an older boy hustled me and another friend over to a spot where the corner of the school met the grassy sports field. He was going to tell us, he said, the worst swear word anyone could ever say—the absolute worst. But first, we had to promise never, ever, ever to say it aloud. It was that bad. Could we refrain? We could, of course we could! He was taller than us, so he had to stoop a little as he pulled us close and whispered the worst word anyone could ever possibly say:

“Period.”

We were aghast.

Then he explained what it meant, and we were aghast all over again.

By the end of the day, I’d said “period” aloud several times, and never in a way that made any sense. Believe me when I tell you: It was hilarious.

Thus began a good decade and a half of constant, unnecessary swearing—never in front of adults, of course, only with peers. It’s no great insight to observe that kids start swearing as an easy form of transgression, then wind up doing it by default, fucks substituting for ums and likes. The cursing never really means anything—it just signifies who the curser is: a teen willing to break society’s dumb rules. And that’s all those words need to do at that point in a person’s life; no one cares about the subtle differences between bullshit and horseshit. Precision is for grown-ups.

Well, for some, anyway. Plenty of us swear all the damn time, regardless of the context and without worrying about what, exactly, we mean by these words. They’re intensifiers, there to add lightly transgressive emphasis to our communication. In conversation, I swear a lot, mostly for a broad effect. I love saying, ”Jesus fucking Christ,” because I’m Jewish, so there’s a cute irony to taking in vain the name of a lord I don’t recognize. I swear in meetings at work, partly to make it okay for other co-workers to do likewise. One of them, who may in fact be reading this newsletter, always apologizes when she curses, and I always tell her I don’t fucking care.

More after the ad, which you are invited to click…

It’s time to STOP using Honey and Credit Karma

🍯 Honey? More like yesterday's news. 🐝
💳 Credit Karma? So last season.
🍎 Apple Pay? Please, we're just getting started.

Meet Kudos: The free browser extension that's about to make your wallet feel like it just hit the gym. 💪

1. Maximize rewards at 3M+ stores

2. Discover credit card deals so hot, they're NSFW

3. One-click checkout faster than you can say "take my money"

Available on desktop and iPhone. Why settle for less when you can Kudos your way to savings?

Use code "EARN" to get $20 back after your first eligible purchase. Your wallet will thank you (probably with cash).

Download Now—It’s Free!

If I curse a lot, my kids—who claim they swear less than their friends “for balance”—don’t notice. They say they can’t remember the first time they heard me swear, although they do vividly remember hearing our neighbor Jeff yell “Fuck!” when he accidentally spilled soup on our old couch. (Jeff’s daughter, notably, did not react.) I don’t remember any of this, but I do remember that ugly, uncomfortable couch. Fuck that couch.

Those of us who curse frequently, science says, tend to be more intelligent, more honest, more creative, better able to handle pain. That sounds like… baloney? Or maybe not. To swear is to embrace the full range of human expression, from nice to nasty to, let’s hope, really, really nasty; there’s a visceral joy to enunciating the Anglo-Saxon phonemes of our profanity that you don’t get with more timid syllables. Whereas limiting your vocabulary limits your life, your thoughts—if you will not permit yourself this most minor of guilty pleasures, then what’s left for you? (“Guilt should play no part in pleasure,” says Nigella Lawson, but I always misremember it as: “Those who feel guilty do not deserve pleasure.”) This isn’t quite an endorsement of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it tracks: If you censor how you express yourself, you may censor what you express. Whatever, as a proud pottymouth, I’ll take pop-science approval where I can.

And in any case, speech is not writing. Speech is casual, improvisatory, ephemeral. Writing ain’t. In writing, we should choose our words far more carefully, hyper-conscious of the individual and cumulative effects. As a writer, I want you to pay rapt attention to my sentences because I have labored over them myself¹. And when I curse, I want those words to land as Barth’s did, but with a Gross spin, all my omnidirectional fury channeled into one outstanding motherfucking expletive.

Still, even with such a wealth of expression to draw on, I sometimes feel let down by our English-language curses, and I long for fresh filth. French is no help, putain and merde and bordel being far too gentle. Ditto Spanish’s joder. German’s scheiße is just sibilant shit. Is Italian’s cazzo abrasive enough to work? I’ll try, but I’m not optimistic. Maderchod, đù mẹ, 撚樣? Now we’re getting pretentious. The invented, constructed languages of sci-fi never quite get it right, either. Battlestar Galactica brought in frack as the common curse word, but it never sounded anything but silly to me—odd how that little r turns the sound from dirty to goofy. The Expanse gets credit for using pashang, adapted from the Chinese 爬上, as the fuck of Belter Creole, but I’m not nearly nerdy enough to utter it in polite company.

The word that sticks in my mind, however, is another one from childhood—from sixth grade in Amherst, Massachusetts, where my teacher was Brian McNamara, a.k.a. Mr. Mac, a beloved educator who encouraged my writing (and who was name-checked in last summer’s indie movie Janet Planet). One week, our class had a unit on Emily Dickinson, the poet-heroine whom everyone in Amherst was required to worship, and part of the project was to … draw her portrait. As you may recall, I am not good at drawing, and I knew it even then, at age 11. I would not, I could not, do the portrait. I wound up in tears. At which point Mr. Mac came over and gave me a rousing pep talk that concluded, “In my class, can’t is a swear word—it’s the only word you’re not allowed to say!” By the end of class, I’d drawn the portrait. It was terrible, but it didn’t matter. I’d gotten over myself and just done the darn thing. The future creator of “Trying!” took this lesson to heart: can’t is a four-letter word. Period.

See you next Tuesday! 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: Suppertime

I met Robbe Reddinger during my all-too-brief stint at Runner’s World, where he wrote movingly about his brother’s struggles with addiction and about Baltimore’s deeply segregated running scene. Now, in addition to his editorial duties at Believe in the Run, he’s writing a weekly newsletter called Suppertime, which recounts his life in ways both quotidian and quietly epic, with a structure roughly following that of a meal/menu. He’s a fab writer; here’s a brief excerpt from last week’s edition, which I found particularly lovely:

For more—and to find out where the bullet went—go read and subscribe here:

Notes

1. And as a reader, I make the reciprocal demand—if you want me to spend time with your words, you better well have chosen them carefully.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt