Along the Way: Kosher cussin’ deserves study, gosh darn it!

What does a preacher say when he aims for a nail and smashes his thumb?

Or when he gets a real charge out of an uncooperative light socket in the parsonage?

It was with this sort of thing in mind that I once proposed to an old friend, the Rev. Peter Vaught, that we collaborate on a book of ecclesiastical profanity.

A liberal, broad-minded and understanding sort of guy, Peter took the idea under advisement. Then he took off on another assignment somewhere in a far corner of the state, and I haven’t heard from him since.

Another minister said “tsk, tsk,” or something like that, and placed his hand on my head and promised to pray for me.

The book hasn’t taken off yet, but the idea is still there.

It seems to me a sanctioned swear word now and then — Kosher cussin’ if you will — would be a useful tool for a man or woman of the cloth.

“When angry,” Mark Twain enjoined us, “count to four. When very angry, swear.” I’m sure our greatest American author included pastors in that admonition.

The idea has its limits, of course. I mean, nobody wants to be a pottymouth like Ozzie Guillen, for example. Ozzie is the manager of the Chicago White Sox, and either his mother didn’t have a bar of that red Lifebuoy soap around the house when he was growing up, or she wasn’t aware of its primary purpose.

If you magically removed the “F” word from Ozzie’s vocabulary, he would be unable to communicate.

He uses it as noun, verb, modifier and, I’m sure, as a release from the pain of whacking his thumb with a hammer.

People like Ozzie are beyond help, and it’s not them I have in mind.

But we need to have “ouch” words, even ye who do not swear, bless your hearts.

Over the generations words such as “good grief” and “good gravy” have be used. “Gosh darn” is a familiar phrase that waters down you-know-what.

Back in Kansas, I once played town-team softball with a great pitcher named Maynard Shobe, a Navy veteran who often used the expression “son of a biscuit-eater.”

Some other fellow who leaned toward naval terms, and I seem to think it may have been former UCLA pitching coach Glenn Mickens (who once pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers), had a pet name for those he considered a jerk. That “son of a sea cook,” he’d exclaim

When Australia’s Kerry Melville was among the best women’s tennis players in the world, she had a pet word when a serve went awry or she otherwise messed up.

“Bunnies!” Miss Melville would exclaim. I don’t know that much about Australian culture, so maybe the word has more than one meaning.

But Kerry was such a great tennis player, she didn’t need to yell “bunnies!” very often. It is a soft, cuddly word, though, and it seemed to take the edge off a stressful situation for her.

I knew a guy once who had a rather elaborate phrase for those revolting predicaments we sometimes slip into.

He’d yell, “cheese and crackers got all muddy.” Maybe you can figure that one out.

Uncle Rudy, a step-uncle if there is such a thing, was a Missouri farmer known to reel off “golly gosh darn, shoot fire, heck fooey.”

Now that’s a mouthful of minor league swearing, if you ask me.

W.C. Fields, the comedian, loved to invent his own cuss words. He used “drat!” quite often in his distinguished movie career, and “mother of pearl!”

So the idea isn’t new, but it seems to me that preachers ought to have in their offices, a bound volume of accepted ecclesiastical profanity for those occasions when one might be apt to slip into minor transgression, having flattened a thumb into a throbbing, reddish purple blob or dropped a Christmas fruitcake on a toe.

“The best thing about a little judicious swearing,” wrote author-humorist Finley Peter Dunne, “is that it keeps the temper…a compromise between running away and fighting. Before it was invented, there were only two ways out of an argument.”

We’ve all heard such old sayings as, “It was enough to make a deacon swear,” or “enough to make a preacher kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”

So my idea isn’t new.

And let me say here, I am against violence off all kind, unless intended for houseflies, moths, selected politicians, birds that miraculously make deposits on the SIDE of my car — how do they do that? — and people in the car behind me honking the horn for no logical reason.

I cringe when people cuss a blue streak for no reason other than to punch up a sentence. Those poor souls with vocabularies so anemic they feel they have to swear, every other word, ought to be reminded of Grandma’s Lye Soap, the original version of that red Lifebuoy stuff.

But in moderation, of course, there should be within reach of every man and woman of the cloth, a small assortment of approved oaths intended not to turn the vestibule, the nave or the narthex blue. . .

But an nice periwinkle, perhaps.

And I’m workin’ on it.

Corky Simpson, former Tucson Citizen columnist and first inductee into The Associated Press Sports Editors state sportswriters Hall of Fame, writes a Friday column for the Green Valley News.