My salacious sailor mouth...

So two things that give me trouble with my blogging is overcoming my propensity to swear as exclamation and punctuation and using words like propensity. The swearing part is easy to overcome, I can delete the expletives if they seem gratuitous, no biggie.

My vocabulary, on the other hand, is just about as changeable as my DNA. I don't really think that I use words that are unusual by my Honors English high school student and English degree holding husband will stop me and ask for clarification and/or definitions.

I blame my grandma and the Valley View School system.

My grandma gets a prize on both counts. As far as the swearing goes, I figure what I picked up from my dad, he picked up partially from her. The five-dollar words are the result of many years of a gift subscription to Reader's Digest and a voracious appetite for Word Power.

Flash forward to high school and the lovely yellow vocab books. Every week for four years, we poured through these books that I think must have been written to increase verbal scores on college exams. I always did well on those, and as point of geekness I always finished the book. Yep, I was that kid who finished the unfinished portion of the workbook for fun.

I would purposely try to use the words correctly in conversation.  It's a bit like rhyming, once you start you can't stop.

In a way, it's all just words. Who cares what I say as long as you understand the message I am trying to convey? But then we go and attach all sort of emotion and spectacle to these sound vibrations and you end up with fighting words.

Maybe I talk the way I do because I am from Ohio. Southwestern Ohio where there is no cool accent, not like in Cleveland or Toledo where the New York and Michigan influences an be heard. I suppose there is a fair amount of drawl, but my people aren't originally from this area.

In the grand scheme of things, if I had to unlearn anything it would be the vocabulary. A well-uttered F-bomb can convey more meanings than half the dictionary, and to be honest, no one acts like you've made up words. And I've noticed that pretty much everyone gets your point the first time. Aside from unlearning vocabulary, I wish I'd learned and used more slang. I wish I had loved grammar less, too. It certainly would make texting quicker. My brain doesn't function at the level I need it to all the time to be articulate and if it had never learned to be in the first place losing it would be such a BFD.