Some find it odd

- Did you just say "fatherfucker"?

- I said, “Check your blind spot, crazy-ass fatherfucker.”

- That’s bizarre.

- Asshole! Get off the road! Why bizarre? Everyone should before changing lanes.

- No, not that – but that you would say fatherfucker.

- Some find it odd.

- Because it is.

- Not as odd as grandfatherfucker. But, see how it sounds all important and -- well -- grand?

- Do you use that too?

- Yes, but only for effect. Not when I am really pissed off.

- I am just used to the simple motherfucker.

- Most are. But my logic is that of the purist non-vegetarian. If you eat one animal you have to eat them all. After all, what makes sheep more edible than cats? And what makes mothers more fuckable than fathers? If you use one incestuous relationship to vent your anger you have to use them all.

- I am not so sure. Humans are animals too, and even purist non-vegetarians, as you describe them, do not eat their own kind. So if you go all the way with your swears because you think purist non-vegetarians go all the way with their diet – well, they really don’t.

- Alright, point taken. I go all the way merely because I care to go all the way.

- Yes. But you are intellectualizing the act of swearing. My understanding – and neither of us can claim to be experts – is that the swear is anger spontaneously released by voicing tabooed sexual relationships. These are things that have been repressed since infancy, and when one finds a situation, a valve to discharge it as an adult, bubbling out they come. That you would employ logic and pre-thought to deliberately say “fatherfucker” makes it a swear no longer. It’s merely an intellectual position – admirable or not – but not a swear.

- Then what you are saying is also this: if I were a woman, then as an infant I would have been naturally attracted to my father and brothers – I know, but let’s just keep this purely heterosexual for now – and that attraction would have been repressed. Then later as an adult I may find myself in a situation that makes me angry or emotionally unstable enough to release that repression by saying fatherfucker or brotherfucker or some such thing. Right? But how many times have you heard such swears before today, even from women? Why are fathers and brothers protected? What makes them special? I think it is unfair to exclusively use motherfucker as the universal swear. Fatherfucker and motherfucker should be evenly used and I am doing my bit to better the world.

- Strange means you employ. But still you are not a woman, and therefore your swear is fraudulent.

- But I could be a homosexual man. Would then my usage of ‘fatherfucker’ fit into your logic?

- I don’t know. And neither do you. I mean, how can we, both laymen, even begin to venture there? Is infantile attraction genderless, or already homosexual and heterosexual? Does a baby even know whether it is a boy or a girl? Is it attracted to mother and father equally? Or at all for that matter? What do we know about any of this?

I know. And it’s not that any of this swearing means anything. You swear, you stay sane. You don’t, you don’t.