Tourette's Syndrome

My office mate, Cartman, Sara and I all have tourette’s syndrome. For those of you who don’t know, Tourette's Disorder is a neurological disorder characterized by involuntary body movements and vocal outbursts for at least 12 months. The three of us have involuntary eye twitches and frequent vocal outbursts that involve a lot of profanity. In the last 10 minutes, Cartman has dropped the F bomb and GD more than 20 times. Today is a low stress day, the day I blew up the magnetic I cursed for a couple hours straight. I still find myself throwing out random profanity when I think about the magnet.

When I was growing up my mother would not allow profanity in our home, she claimed it was a sign of ignorance. However the more educated I became the more profanity slipped into my vocabulary. When I received my PhD I informed my mother that I had achieved the highest education standard and could use as much profanity as I wanted. She quickly informed my youngest brother (20 years my junior) that he could not use profanity until he had a PhD too.

Cartman, Sara and I all have PhDs (though Sara is a chemist and that doesn’t count as much) and we all use so much profanity. It is funny and adds comic relief to our day. Is profanity a sign of ignorance? And if so ignorance of polite society, because it is definitely not ignorance of science.