"He works in profanity like Picasso worked in oils."

I recently noticed that Oliver, the younger son, was smacking himself in the head completely out of the blue. He did this a couple of times before I finally asked him why he was hitting himself. Turns out, like a good old-school Catholic, he was flogging himself for impure thoughts.

Let me back up a bit. My job is very repetitive, typing as fast as I can for my entire shift. For ergonomic reasons, I have to take non-typing breaks. I usually read for five minutes or check e-mail or something. Last weekend I decided to burn a new mix CD for the car. Since all my music is on the computer it's just a matter of picking out the songs and away we go. So I picked out a CD worth of songs that nobody likes but me. I started out with the Black Eye Peas, "My Humps", a very dumb, very catchy song. I decided to keep with that theme and do all up-tempo songs by women. Missy Elliot, Gwen Stefani, Salt and Peppa, that sort of thing. I labeled it "Girl Jams", tossed it in the car, and promptly forgot about it. (Do you know how often I drive alone in the car? Almost never. The whole exercise was not the most productive use of my time.)

Later, Quin took the boys to swimming. He saw the CD and put it in the player. I'm not sure why he thought something labeled "Girl Jams" would be something he'd like, or how he got Oliver to let him put on something that wasn't Beck. I should have put a parental advisory sticker on this CD, but honestly it didn't occur to me that they'd ever want to play it. They got through "My Humps" without incident, but then they hit Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl". Catchy tune, like a cheerleader thing, but the word "shit" comes up repeatedly. The bridge goes: "This shit is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S."

Unfortunately Oliver liked it a lot. He got it in his head and he can't get it out. But it has "sailor talk" in it, so he can't sing it. So when he hears the call of Gwen in his head, he hits himself.

Personally I'm not bothered by profanity. I suppose it's a love of language. I love the words of Shakespeare. I love the words of Quentin Tarantino. The problem comes with society at large; no one wants a foul-mouthed 4-year-old (particularly not his grandparents). So he's not allowed to repeat the bad words he hears. But he wants to. He complains when he hears "sailor talk" because it makes him "interested to talk that way". A world of words he wants to explore but can't. When you're older, dear. When you're older.

The other problem is that his bedroom is at the end of the short hallway that leads to the living room. He can sit in his doorway and see the TV when his father and I are watching grown-up movies (and that's when he's not out right sneaking into the hall). I recently rewatched the works of Kevin Smith back-to-back, and Quin and I watched all the American Pie movies last week. We caught the last half of "Pulp Fiction" on one of the movie channels. I'm not sure how much of these he hears from his room (I always turn the subtitles on because we tend to err on the side of low volume). But I think if Gwen Stefani makes him interested to use "sailor talk", what of Seann William Scott? As Fred Willard says, SWS works in profanity the way Picasso worked in oils (and you really see that if you watch the out-takes. He varies his profanity in every take. Quite the foul-mouthed improviser). I wouldn't call him Picasso mself; he's not yet working at the level of a Kevin Smith or a Quentin Tarantino.

Perhaps I have sympathy for Oliver since I had to clean up my own speech early on in my mom-hood. I know the siren call of profanity. Which is how we ended up watching half of a fullscreen version of "Pulp Fiction" on TV when we own the letterboxed DVD. It came up while Quin was channel-surfing and I begged him to stop. "I just want to hear the scene about dead nigger storage." And then: "We can turn it in a minute, I just want to hear Sam Jackson say 'Well I'm a mushroom-cloud-layin' motherfucker, motherfucker!' " Before I knew it we'd watched the rest of the movie. I can't watch Shakespeare without saying the lines with the actors; Tarantino is the same way.