(Originally published in Boston’s Weekly Dig. This is a revised version.)
Recently, I learned a hard lesson. A lesson about boundaries. A lesson, even, about interpersonal communications. A lesson about the dick you can’t take back.
I’m an academic – a political scientist – so I spend a lot of time hanging around with professor types. These are guys who nail editorial cartoons to their office doors that show a guy looking forlorn at a bar, saying “I miss the commies”. They talk politics, they pay attention to the British elections. They teach classes about torture and build software that predicts violent conflict. Almost as a rule, they use the Queen’s English.
So it was a surprise when, several months ago, a faculty member I had befriended referred to a group of people as “a bunch of shitheads.”
My eyes lit up. I think of myself as an intellectual, a cultured young man that is as worldly as he is compassionate and forthright. That being said, I also recognize that in speech I am often a crude, crass bastard when among friends. I’m not sure why, but when I am around my best pals or people I profoundly respect, the conversation is usually peppered with profanity. I find myself speaking the best English when I’m around people I don’t particularly care about one way or another.
This could be a fundamental flaw, built into my personality at a formative time. It is my sincere hope that if I ever work in the White House, I will be able to discuss foreign relations without referring to a country collectively as “a pack of assholes.” The days of Nixon, after all, are over.
So when Dr. Politics broke the swear barrier, I was relieved. Here was someone I could not only talk to about heady things like the Congo’s GNP, but I could also discuss them with the usual peppering of fucks that enrich my most comfortable mode of communication.
Base language and lowbrow references continued for several weeks. I managed to tell a joke about economists eating piles of shit that killed. When I mentioned, during the Schiavo debacle, that it was my sincere opinion that House Republicans could “huff a bag of dongs,” my neology was met with the kind of appreciative chuckle it deserved, even though Dr. Politics is a classic-conservative Republican.
It was not to last. Like all great linguistic movements, my attempt to infuse political discourse with salt-of-the-earth American vulgarity would eventually run into an insurmountable, culturally codified roadblock.
Last week, I was talking to Dr. Politics about an exam I had coming up. We were engaged in the usual good-natured ribbing, so I thought nothing of the following exchange:
Dr. Politics: “Well, I guess you’ll just have to study, won’t you?”
Me: “I know I’ll have to study, dick.”
His face scrunched up and the air between us became thick with partisan discomfort.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “I thought we had a special relationship!”
“Not special enough for you to call me a dick,” he replied.
I had crossed a line and I knew it. I don’t regret saying it, because in my circles, ‘dick’ is a sign of respect, a term of endearment. It also acknowledges a particularly decent burn. Early in my internship at the Dig, Editor Joe Keohane sounded surprised in asking “Wow, you’re from Texas and you know who your father is?”
My reply? “Thanks, dick.” Our professional relationship was immediately cemented, committed to journalistic excellence and forged in a mutual appreciation of ribaldry.
I’m not sure how this could have been avoided. It was a situation we’ve all been in – you reach a level of comfort with someone and then you unwittingly cross some invisible line they have drawn for themselves and never revealed to you.
What then to do? The next time I feel chummy with someone, should I give them a list of words I regularly employ and ask them to underline the ones they find offensive? Would it be more or less comfortable for me to say “Hey, in the future, I plan on calling you a dick in a jocular way. This signifies that I have accepted you as an intellectual equal. Is that okay, or should I call you something else?”
He asked me if I call my wife a bitch, and I said “No, but she calls me a bitch quite often.” He rolled his eyes. What a dick.
