"cheese and rice"

If you ever happen to catch Wedding Crashers on television — but not a premium cable station, you will encounter one of the more amusing and creative substitute curses. Vince Vaughan can repeatedly be heard to exclaim, "Cheese and Rice!" instead of "Jesus Christ!"

There's something about the wack-a-doodle family that Vaughan and Owen Wilson's characters are visiting in the movie, and Vaughan's general comedic presence, that make me think that he should adopt that phrase and use it for real in his next film. I usually don't like edited movies, but somehow the beleaguered Vaughan yelling "Cheese and Rice!" multiple times makes for an even funnier scene in a pretty damn funny movie. I mean, darn funny movie. Oh, shut the front door.

twerp

In my unending search for alternate curse words (to employ mainly while behind the wheel) it recently occurred to me that twerp might be a good choice, as opposed to jerk, idiot, or worse. Twit is also a contender.

Any other suggestions?

I know I first hear it from my dad, who may also have been looking for less colorful language. Not sure I buy the Tolkien association offered by Wiktionary. That seems altogether too twerpy to believe.

nonsense and insensibility

Yesterday my daughter and I were standing at a corner after a shopping excursion at Target, waiting for the light to change in our favor when two young dudes came up behind us, talking very loudly and only using expletives.

I was this close to turning around and yelling at them to STFU (speak the language of the natives) when the light finally changed and they skateboarded and biked on their way, still cursing, still oblivious. My daughter looked up at me and said, "I don't like them." I couldn't help myself and answered, "There's nothing to like."

What has happened to communication in our culture?

I have been immersed in reading classic literature lately, so their conversation sounded especially jarring to my ears. I understand that young dudes are prone to bombast. I have been known to use a colorful turn of phrase (or two or three) myself, but I am working on trying to clean up my act. No promises for any utterances made whilst driving...

But couldn't the two dudes in question, even if they were being loud and full of themselves, have taken a pause, or at least turned down the volume when they came within inches of a 5 1/2 year old girl? It didn't even occur to them.


Cher Horowitz: So okay, I don't want to be a traitor to my generation and all but I don't get how guys dress today. I mean, come on, it looks like they just fell out of bed and put on some baggy pants and take their greasy hair - ew - and cover it up with a backwards cap and like, we're expected to swoon? I don't think so.

fiditty

No, not Puff Daddy or P. Diddy or Puffy or whatever the hell he's calling himself these days. Fiditty was one of my dad's euphemisms for poop. Crap. Numero due. He had a lot of expressions for lots of things. I think he dreamed it up. I've never heard it anywhere else.

One of my brother's early words (learned from Pop) was lollapalooza (he pronounced it yayapayoozah), which was one of my dad's words for something unbelievable. Used in a sentence, "Munson's grand slam was some lollapalooza."

He did a fair share of name calling. I now wonder if it was a reflection of his generation, or alternative cursing. Bad drivers and errant Yankees (New York, that is) could earn the appellation "knucklehead," "dimwit," or "furshlugginer twit." Furshlugginer is of course an adjective.

He also cursed, whenever his Sicilian temper boiled over. I probably didn't learn all the really bad words from him, but I probably heard them first used to their full effect. Being a newspaperman, his most colorful cursing always read like a headline to me, "Shit, piss and corruption." Love that one. Used it myself.

Language is an amazing thing. We learn words, first spoken aloud, as someone speaks or reads to us, and then later, as we learn to read ourselves. Conversation, and not books, however, is where most colorful phrases seem to originate. Hopefully, as we read computer screens more and more, we won't lose the desire to converse, even curse at each other in creative and wonderful ways. No emoticons required.