Profanity

Leander, Texas

12:09 pm

Dear Leah, Jack & Adam-

I used to dread playing golf with Russell.

Not because of his swing or pace of play.

It was the mouth.

Russell dropped more f-bombs per round than he did strokes off par.

By the second hole I wasn’t tracking his score anymore. I was tracking his vocabulary.

If you’ve never worked in a kitchen, understand this: it is not a profession known for gentle language. Cussing isn’t the exception in a busy restaurant, it’s the house style.

I picked it up early, and I carried it with me, though I’d like to think I was minor league compared to most of the people I worked alongside.

My weakness wasn’t casual profanity.

 It was profanity under pressure — the kind that showed up when I was angry or cornered and couldn’t get my emotions back in the box fast enough.

I have one story that still humbles me.

I’d recently been promoted into a new position, and as part of that move, I inherited an employee who reported to me — a guy my boss had hired, not me.

 He wasn’t working out, and my boss and I sat down with him to deliver a formal reprimand, following protocol before what both of us already knew was a termination coming soon after.

He didn’t take my comments well. He pushed back. And I pushed back harder — hard enough that my language went somewhere it had no business going, in a meeting where I was supposed to be the composed one, talking to a man who was about to lose his job.

Afterward, my boss called me out for it. Justifiably. It wasn’t a lecture, just a direct observation that I’d let myself down in that room.

It landed hard, and it stuck with me longer than the meeting itself did.

That’s the moment I decided to clean up my mouth — not in some vague, general-resolution way, but for real.

Here’s what I did.

Every time I swore, I kept count.

At the end of the month, I wrote a check — five dollars per infraction — to a cause or a candidate I couldn’t stand. Not a charity I liked. Not something neutral. Something that bothered me to support.

Discipline is hard to sustain when the only thing at stake is a vague sense that you should do better.

But attach an actual cost to the behavior — money, and worse, money going somewhere you despise — and the behavior changes in a hurry.

Nothing motivates self-control quite like funding the opposition.

Russell never had a reason to stop. Nothing was ever on the line for him.

For me, once there was a real cost attached to every slip, the slips got rare fast.

I don’t think the lesson is “never swear.” I still do, occasionally, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise on a website with my name on it.

In fact, I’ve noticed some of those old words creeping back into my vocabulary. Not often, but more than I’d like.

Writing these thoughts isn’t just for Leah, Jack, Adam, or anyone else who stumbles across Former Dishwasher.

It’s for me. I’m swearing too much.

Profanity isn’t a sign of strength. More often, it’s a sign that our emotions have taken control before our judgment has a chance to speak.

I’ve played golf with men who were far better golfers than Russell. They hit shots just as bad, laughed, dropped another ball, and moved on. Years later, I don’t remember their scores. I remember their character.

If you want to know someone’s character, don’t watch how they act when everything is going well. Watch what comes out of their mouth when life doesn’t cooperate.

I discovered my profanity wasn’t really a vocabulary problem. It was an emotional control problem. When I lost control of my emotions, I lost control of my mouth.

I still get frustrated. I still say things I wish I hadn’t from time to time. But that conversation with my boss changed the trajectory of my life.

I learned that cleaning up my language wasn’t about sounding more polished. It was about becoming more disciplined. The words changed because the person speaking them was changing.

I’m not interested in being the guy who clutches his pearls over language. I spent enough years in kitchens to have no standing for that.

But I do think the wholesale acceptance of profanity is a quiet marker of something bigger: a general lowering of the bar for what we consider acceptable, simply because enough people did it long enough that nobody bothered to object anymore.

When I was growing up, profanity existed, but it wasn’t commonplace. Today it’s everywhere—movies, television, podcasts, social media, sporting events, and everyday conversation. The word that once shocked us barely gets our attention anymore.

I’m not suggesting civilization rises or falls because someone utters a four-letter word. But I do think language reflects culture. When we become comfortable saying anything, anytime, to anyone, we’ve lowered a standard. Standards rarely erode all at once. They disappear one compromise at a time.

Leah, Jack, and Adam, you’ll live in a world where people tell you words don’t matter. I disagree. Words reveal habits. Habits reveal character. And character, more than talent or intelligence, determines the course of a life.

Papa