Ever since my return from Tunisia the other week, I’ve been a little homesick—hearing echoes, feeling this fatherland I love press itself into the margins of my days. At a bodega in Brooklyn the other day, buying a breakfast sandwich, I nearly asked “Qaddesh?”—Tunisian for “How much?”—before catching myself like someone waking from a dream mid-sentence, still speaking its language.
It reminded me of my brother, who spent the last two years teaching in Tunis. The day after he returned, we stopped for coffee near our house. The barista handed him his cup and he reflexively said, “Aychek, merci.” A melange of Arabic and French—Frarabic—a dialect that exists nowhere officially and everywhere emotionally.
“Dude, what are you doing?” I said. “We’re in rural Pennsylvania.” But the truth is, after only two weeks there, my own tongue was already slipping back into that old terrain—faithful to the last place it felt fully free.
As I wrote recently, I love that easy back-and-forth of Arabic and French and English—that braided linguistic chaos that always feels like home. It’s stitched into my family. When we raise a glass, we’re as likely to say the English “cheers” or the French “santé” as the Arabic “saha.” When my dad speaks to his brothers, his professorial French slips into a Tunisian accent—r’s rolling thickly, darija threaded through like a secret handshake. And when my brother and I are together, we default to Franglish, switching between French and English without a thought, reaching for whichever word—whichever world—fits the sentence, the sentiment best.
My mom, meanwhile—Swiss, operating with only a smattering of Arabic—uses “inshallah” often and somewhat ironically, because in a work context the word drives her a little batty. Ask a collaborator in Tunisia about a deadline and they’ll often answer, “Inshallah” (God willing).
She hears: maybe.
She wants: yes or no.
And so it’s become a family joke. She asks me to clear the table.
“Inshallah,” I say.
She groans.
In the United States, unless you’re an immigrant, speaking multiple languages is treated as a cultural flex—evidence of worldliness, or at least the suggestion of a semester abroad. But elsewhere—especially in North Africa—it’s simply a means of getting through the day or the cost of doing business in an economy shaped by tourism. French lingers as colonial residue; English drifts in on the currents of pop music and television. (Two of my younger cousins learned to speak fluent “American” from watching Friends, which I find both hilarious and faintly poignant.)
As a child who moved around a lot—preschool in Switzerland and then Tunisia, kindergarten through second grade in upstate New York, third grade back in Tunisia, sixth grade in Switzerland, and so on—I was preoccupied with belonging, with the question of how people determine you’re “one of them.” Whenever my mother, with her thick French accent, mispronounced a word in English, I corrected her ferociously, with that zeal of the eldest child who believes assimilation is a group family project she’s personally responsible for.
Language was my portal. I kept long lists of idioms in my journal because slang, colloquialisms, even profanity were the true litmus tests of membership. In the margins you’d find things like “talk to the hand!” or “chillin’ like a villain” or “eat my shorts???”—the mid-nineties incantations that functioned as a kind of playground passcode. Later, at twelve in Switzerland, my list read: ça joue (that’s fine), natel (cellphone), tchô (see ya), kiffer (to dig). My Tunisian cousins taught me curse words—sometimes on request, sometimes as a setup. Once, at a family dinner, I asked my aunt Zohra in Arabic to “please pass the penises,” fully convinced I’d said “peppers.”
Over time, all this linguistic collecting turned me into an expert code-switcher—the kind of person who can slip into whatever register the room requires. It’s a useful skill, though not without its complications. When you grow up toggling between countries, accents, and expectations, your ear becomes finely trained; your tongue sometimes a little too eager to comply.
Take my marriage, for instance. Jon is someone who doesn’t curse. He says things like “shucks” or “got doggit” or “gee willikers” when he’s upset—as if Walt Disney himself were narrating his frustrations. If he’s singing lyrics with a cuss word, he’ll bleep himself, which always makes me laugh (see: his Tiny Desk performance with Juvenile, around minute 15:45). And so around him, without ever consciously deciding to, I stopped cursing. My sentences come out scrubbed, wholesome, as if they’ve been through some sort of Southern charm-school rinse cycle.
But put me on the phone with a friend who swears like a sailor, and suddenly my vocabulary blossoms into its saltier forms. It’s not performance; it’s instinct. A long-practiced habit of attunement. A way of signaling: I’m with you. I get it. I belong.
Of course, the danger in all this linguistic shapeshifting is that you can lose track of your original voice—the one that isn’t trying to match or soothe or blend. The one unbothered by the rules of whatever country, classroom, or kitchen table you happen to be sitting at. Your purest, untranslated self.
I’ve learned a thousand and one ways to belong. I’m still learning the art of belonging to myself—work, I suspect, that’s lifelong for all of us.
I’m learning that language is never just language; it’s the map we carry of ourselves and each other, and the words we pick up—or leave unsaid—tell a story. They’re tiny acts of affiliation, of self-protection, of longing or rebellion. And nothing reveals our linguistic loyalties quite like profanity: an unexpected swear exposes the fault lines faster than any polite sentence ever could.
Which brings me to today’s essay by Carmen Radley—an ode to the art, politics, and pleasure of swearing. (Highly recommend the audio version if you enjoy hearing a Southerner deliver a well-timed cuss.)
Some Items of Note—
I’m so excited to announce that The Book of Alchemy has been nominated for the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards! If you enjoyed the book and want to show it a little love, you can cast your vote here.
This week we celebrated the arrival of The Alchemy Journal! It’s a companion to The Book of Alchemy, but it also stands on its own. A journal that’s both beautiful and deeply useful, it’s designed to hold anything and everything—from doodles and to-dos to your wildest, most harebrained dreams.
Mark your calendar! We’ve scheduled our next virtual Journaling Club for Sunday, November 23, from 1–2 PM ET. Holly and Carmen will host this time—they’ll share a spark of inspiration to get you started, then we’ll journal together and explore what surfaces. To join, upgrade to a paid subscription (if you haven’t already), and we’ll send you the Zoom link the day before.
Prompt 359. Cussing by Carmen Radley
My mother will be slightly horrified when she learns that I’ve written a short essay called “Cussing” and have involved her from the jump. Cussin’ is how we said it where I grew up in Southeast Texas, rather than the more refined cursing. You cussed out an old cuss. If you cussed, you were like Gus, which is a reference to a little rhyme my mom and her friends chanted on the playground: “Don’t cuss. Call Gus. Gus’ll cuss for us.” Though now that I think of it, another of her favorite playground rhymes directly contradicted that one. It unspooled in the most languid Texas twang: “Merci beaucoup, you shit ass you.”1
My mom does cuss, and my dad cusses too, though not around my siblings and me when we were young—only the occasional “damn.” Curse words were uncommon enough in our home that for a while I was confused about how “shit” was pronounced, after I heard my grandmother, whose first language was Ukrainian and whose English always came out a little off kilter, say to my grandfather, “Well, shet, Larry.” Mainly I learned curse words from older kids at school. I was under a childish misapprehension that there was a rite of passage for cussing that involved an unmarked but well-known line on the playground that separated third graders from fourth graders, and once I graduated to the other side of that line, damn and shit were mine, and I could use them as I liked.
I wonder, do you feel unsettled by these curse words? (“Uncomfortable with all this cussin’?” I want to say.) When my mother reads this essay, she might. She’s the consummate Southern hostess who’ll drown you in sweet tea if you let her, and she’d rather that I at least try to be ladylike. My sisters and I regularly disappoint her on that front (though she is very proud of us on others). At Thanksgiving about twenty years ago, my younger sister decided to normalize the f-word by asking our mom, in the most casual tone, “Can you please pass the fucking mashed potatoes?” My mom was equally affronted and amused, but the amusement went a long way, for she loves to laugh, and her laughter often comes when we hit the right note between proper and profane. Another Thanksgiving (holidays with family invite a good cuss, don’t they?), when I was living out of the country, that same sister made a card for me. On it, she drew a turkey and a little speech bubble that said, “As a turkey, I feel the need to say: Fuck Thanksgiving.” She had my whole family sign it. My mother’s signature included a caveat: “I do not approve this message.” I’m certain she was at least a little amused.
My mother cusses around us more now, but she still feels an impulse to watch her language. Watching your language is a funny expression. Implied is a kind of vigilance, like minding your manners, your Ps and Qs. One is careful not to transgress. In my youth, in an attempt to shame me into good behavior, a family friend told me that only ignorant people curse, because they have small vocabularies—they don’t know any better words. As a very moralistic and studious child, I took that to heart, but as a less moralistic and still very studious adult, I disagree. I love to cuss. I love the sonic experience—so explosive, so many fricatives and plosives—and the emotional release. I love having all the words at my disposal, not just the polite ones.
I also like how cussing can quickly make an acquaintance into a friend. I imagine the moment where I slip, where I cuss like Gus, then feel I have transgressed. I clutch my pearls a little performatively and say, “Excuse my French.” And you smile and say, in your best imitation of my mother, “Merci beaucoup, you shit ass you.”
Your prompt for the week:
Write about cussing. About whether or not you cuss, and when and why. About whether that has changed over time.
Today’s Contributor—
(pictured with her family last Thanksgiving) is a writer and the managing editor of the Isolation Journals. A graduate of the University of Texas and the Bennington Writing Seminars, she lives in Austin—with her new rescue pup, Penny. (Suleika is responsible both for the dog and for its addition to Carmen’s bio.)
The Alchemy Journal is in the world… and your feedback is everything I hoped—and more!
Truly the greatest-of-all-time journal arrived at my doorstep today! —Erin
It’s a beautiful gift to myself, along with The Book of Alchemy. —Suzanne
I’d forgotten that I pre-ordered two of your beautiful journals. I picked up my order today and almost screamed in the very quiet bookstore when I looked inside the bag. Thank you for putting so much love and intention into your design. —J.T.
Note from Suleika: Carmen first shared this rhyme with me when we were quarantined together in the early days of lockdown, and I thought was hilarious. About a month later, we celebrated Easter with my parents. I repeated the rhyme to my mom, and she looked at me blankly and said, “What are you saying? What language is that?” She couldn’t understand a word and still finds the whole thing bewildering.
Only thing better than a cuss word are the ingenious non-cursing phrases that humans invent to curse without cursing. So many showing up in these comments—from Mary’s “For the love of Pete” at the top of the comments to Mags’s “farging bahstages” down at the bottom. Share yours if you have one!!
What a jolly way to start the day. Thank you both, for the time machine of reflection on parental cussing (they never did around us and honestly, I think, "For the love of Pete" was the closest my mom ever got). Now, Dad was in the Army, so I am sure, his Amo. bag was filled with the necessary "Get your ass in gear." I never cussed in front of my parents as it just would have hurt them and that was the last thing I wanted to do, especially to my kind as a saint mom. Now, me...I have to say, that "I don't give a rat's ass" is probably my go-to favorite. In my mind, I am am a string of curse words, but I teach young children, so matter what happens (and some physically painful things have occurred) I have to simply let sweat pour out and say, "Oh my stars, that 's a doozy." Yep, trained myself to sound like some 1940s newspaper cartoon character.