I was wedged between Old Bill and Uncle Tom on the front bench seat of a blue 1950 Chevy pickup truck. We drove slowly over the terrain of the Ft. Belvoir Golf Club in Alexandria, Virginia at 7:00 AM, leaving tracks on the morning dew. Long bamboo poles, rakes, shovels and buckets rattled in the bed of the pickup. When I was 16, each summer morning started with this threesome. We went from golf green to golf green, raking off the dew with 10-foot poles, cleaning out and smoothing the sand traps, and removing debris that had fallen in the night. One morning at the end of the summer, it was just me and Uncle Tom. Old Bill had fallen and busted his leg sweeping off a green. The tip of the bamboo pole had slipped in the slick dew, creating such leverage on the bracing leg that when the point slipped, he fell.
Old Bill and Uncle Tom were not related to me or each other. They were hard workers from the hollows of West Virginia, come to a sister state to find an easier way to make a living than digging coal. Their hands were callused, their fingernails dirty. Old Bill was a bulky man with beefy hands. A nondescript fabric cap squashed down on his round head. He was shy more than a few teeth and looked like Nikita Khrushchev. Uncle Tom was as lean and bony as Bill was stout and favored a straw hat. Each day, they wore a denim work shirt and either jeans or blue bib overalls. Drugstore bandanas dangled from their back pockets. For lunch break, which they called supper, we found a shady spot to sit. Old Bill and Uncle Tom opened their barn-shaped black metal containers with thermos bottles and slowly munched on whatever the missus had provided. If using a bench, Uncle Tom sat like a prim woman, knees crossed, upper leg moving slowly. They both said little. I followed suit, pulling a PB&J out of my brown paper bag. After lunch they took out crumpled packs of Pall Malls and savored a slow smoke.
For the most part, their frustration was signified by “I swan!” and “For the love of Pete!” Surprise was signified by “Well, don’t that beat all!” Extraordinary circumstances brought out a terse, “Damn it!” and a quick look up to see if the Big Guy in the sky was listening. In the summers that followed, when I installed air conditioning ductwork in a high school and worked for the worldly Specialist First Class Jim Gillespie, cooking at a snack bar, I rarely heard venting beyond the levels set by Old Bill and Uncle Tom. Old Bill and Uncle Tom reserved the Lord’s name for praise rather than anger.
This was not the case at home where my father, the Army officer, tended to apply “God” freely as the accepted prefix to “damn it.” If he vented his anger, as when a screwdriver slipped and gouged his finger or his drive on the third hole hooked into the woods, he muttered the complete three-word oath. His go-to, all-purpose swear word was “Balls!” This led to his oft-quoted doggerel: “Balls!” said the Queen, “If I had ‘em, I’d be King.” He kept his epithets at parade rest when there were ladies present or during a social occasion, of which there were many because military folk are fond of socializing.
I grew up to understand swearing was not done in public and most definitely not in front of women. To swear in a work situation, particularly with senior management present, was awkward, like an ill-timed fart. “Did he really say that?” Swearing in private was understandable. Swearing with guy peers was understandable. Really colorful, adjective-drenched swearing was the province of southerners and gave regional spice to a conversation.
Somewhere along the way, one word rose out of the muck and now rules all: the F-Bomb. Because my posts are G-rated, hereafter I will refer to that word by its Yiddish term: “Shtupp.” You do not find that word in Great Expectations, The Great Gatsby, or in Gone with the Wind. Today, when you read a novel or watch a streaming episode, shtupp words are as common as pigeons in Central Park.
What happened?
Years ago, I was a mergers and acquisitions guy at a public company in St. Petersburg. We were maneuvering to wed another company. The marriage broker was Smith Barney, a white shoe investment banking company. Three of us trekked to the Big Apple for a meeting and waited in the outer office of the top merger maven. We were swept into his presence. Provincial hayseeds, we made sure we had zipped our flies, shined our shoes, and brushed the hay off our hair. Our host greeted us in impeccable bespoke duds, his black hair slicked back in an early Wolf of Wall Street coif. His gold cufflinks glittered when he shot his sleeves. In the conversation that followed, he dropped more shtupps than a B-52 has bombs. On reflection, I realize he was performative. He had to show that, despite his elegance, he was a tough guy and took zero prisoners.
I recently called my sister, the kitchen table psychiatrist. She likes to parse people’s motivations, like someone eating an artichoke. Why had the shtupp word, something that represents one of the most pleasant activities of all, become so, well, nasty? She claimed it is used performatively to express dominance, power. It is a weapon, she said. (I later confirmed it comes from a German word for hit or strike.) I asked, “I understand young guys say it because it establishes their tough cred, their manhood, but why do young woman say it so freely?” “Aha,” she said. “It’s like when women started to wear pants. They took on the role of the oppressor males. Shtupp and pants are symbols of their growing power.” This was uncomfortable for me. Then I recalled Nancy Sinatra singing “One of these days these boots are going to walk all over you.” Ouch.
Helping things along, the English version of shtupp has a lot of aural oomph. Chock-a-block with consonants, it is a fricative, is very satisfactory to say. In the Netflix drama The Diplomat, the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James barks it out freely. She uses it as noun, adjective, verb, and adverb, sometimes in an adjective/noun or adverb/verb combo. By contrast, in any given show on PBS, there will be almost zero shtupp-saying, though some actual shtupping may occur.
Where do you go after shtupp is sprinkled in all conversations, right up there with “like?” The word will be as common as McDonald’s hamburgers. It will lose its mojo. What does a girl say then, when she is really annoyed?
How about, “For Pete’s sake!”
