I hate swearing. In fact, that collection of taboo words that we have in the English language have always irked me ever since I was a little kid, and if you speak with the people who have known me the longest, they will collectively verify that I have yet to utter those certain words. That’s not to say that I don’t get angry or haven’t learned the art of chopping someone up through words, but swearing to me is the desperate last resort of someone who truly has nothing better to say.

This may sound a little harsh, especially in today’s *anything goes* society, but along with a few other traits, I have held onto this mantra for a couple of decades now. Even with such views though, I’ve become desensitized to pretty much anyone saying anything vulgar and in fact get along quite well with many a foul-mouthed person. As I go along in life though, I still always come back to feeling that an F-bomb here or a slithery cuss there could have and would have made a much more forceful and intelligent point if the person I was listening to had chosen to illustrate their feelings through the wide variety of articulation that English offers us (it is one of the most redundantly populated languages in history, word-wise) rather than take the cheap route and sum it all up with an explisitive. It has gotten so bad in recent years that I have regularly encountered conversations with my peers in Generation Y who truly don’t understand what the big deal is about swearing. The argument that you wouldn’t want to have your five-year old hearing certain words holds no water anymore. I might tackle why that is so worrisome another day (in case it isn’t obvious), but for now I’ll leave it as a personal concern that we are losing all sense of decency in society; it’s not evolving like the social engineers of the “progressive” Left like to argue - to evolve means that something old changes into something new. This is more like extinction - something old (common courtesy) disappears completely. In fact, the only argument that I have left to literally shut people up when they start firing off their vulgarities is that I just don’t want to hear it; I suppose I should be thankful that it’s so rare to find someone who openly takes offense to a potty mouth these days since the typical reaction is shock on the part of my sailor-mouthed colleague, which in turn leads to discomfort and hence a change in the conversation topic, but I would still do without the hassle. I see it as a trespass upon my life to have such thoughts invite themselves into my life suddenly…

…which brings me to Rod Stewart, or Sir Rod as he’s known these days. I gotta admit that the man might have just become the first of Her Royal Majesty’s knights to live up to the code of chivalry the knights swear by in the past 50 years after what he did on Tuesday, where he publicly lambasted the performers at Live Earth (Chris Rock and Madonna in particular) for opening their clap traps and unleashing a furry of indecencies upon the watching public at home who were tuning in around the 8 pm vicinity. Stewart told his fans on Tuesday night that he would personally give each of them a 10 pound note (roughly $20) if they heard him swear that evening. What a crazy world we live in: a rock star telling the charity types about decency.

As a consequence, I’m going to look later tonight for a Stewart song to buy on iTunes, just to show my appreciation for what Stewart said and did. It might not be much, but it means a lot to me to see someone else out there, somewhere, who at least remembers why we call it swearing in the first place. As for all those on The Left who opt to use vulgarity and foul language to make their point every time they get on their soap boxes (and they all do it from Bono to Suzuki to New Democrat MPs/MPPs), just remember that there are some of us, at least two now, who realize what you are doing and have pity on you; after all, we understand that you really have nothing better to say!