*

Little kids say fuck.  They say it and they know what it means.  Or, anyway, they sort of know what it means -- they may have some outlandish theories on the details (when I was little, I had a tentacle theory of female anatomy that resembles a few Japanese animation movies I saw when I was 15 to such an alarming degree that I suspect the theory may be common among a lot of gynecologically ignorant young men.  Maybe it's some kind of ancestral memory -- could we all be related to the Octopus?)  Anyway, all ages are sure of the in-and-out part.  I'm basing my assertion on my own experience as a little kid -- that was in the 80s -- so, my knowledge came in large part from dirty jokes that I heard on the playground at the Little People's Landing daycare center -- like the one where the three soldiers comes back from war and stop at a farm house; there's a farmer who says, "you can stay, but don't put your dicks in any of those three holes"; the soldiers ignore the warning; the next morning, they find out that the farmer's wife was behind the first hole, his daughter behind the second, and . . . the butcher behind the third; hahahahahaha.  (That joke must have been on the playground since the civil war!  Since when do soldiers come WALKING home and pass farm houses?) Today, what with the internet and other porn outlets, I'm certain that little kids are on even more sure footing when they say fuck -- and, not only do they know the literal meaning, little kids know the more nuanced uses of the word too.  

So, I can't figure out who we are protecting from "bad" language.  The conversations that I had with my friends when I was 8 are not radically different from the conversations I have with my friends today.  Why am I the only one who remembers the first decade of life?  We weren't pure.  If anything we were MORE cruel -- when was the last time you and your adult friends captured and slaughtered a bunch of grasshoppers for no reason?  (In my defense on the grasshopper thing, I swear that I thought we were operating on them to save their lives -- which doesn't make any sense since I wasn't an entomology prodigy or anything, but that really is what I thought.  I can't speak for the other little sadists who are probably today's architects and firefighters.) We should drop the facade.  All language, including the F-word, is valuable (or at least interesting), and our culture's conventional beliefs about childhood are fiction.  I'll vote for the guy who advocates classes on effective swearing.  Poopy!