Fuck that

Rico says he knows it's Valentine's Day, and he's doing his best, but he will, undoubtedly, curse once or twice on Monday, even though Kim Severson's article in The New York Times tries to explain why you shouldn't, dammit:

It’s shaping up to be a darn nice Valentine’s Day here in Mobile County, Alabama. An optimistic band of Citronelle middle school students hopes that for just one day no one in the county will curse. Perhaps people can substitute “sugar” or “snap”. Or even the powerful “Oh, pickles!”
The Mobile County Commission, acting on a request from students who have formed no-cursing clubs at Lott and Semmes Middle Schools, has declared a daylong ban Monday on bad words. Commissioners also gave Lott Middle School students $5,000, which will finance an assembly featuring McKay Hatch, a California teenager who founded a nationwide No Cussing Club in 2007 as a way to get an entire expletive-loving nation to stop using profanity.
“I know children who grow up in homes where profanity is as prevalent as English,” said Merceria Ludgood, the County Commission member whose district includes Lott Middle School in this small town north of Mobile. “The small issue is cussing,” Ms. Ludgood said. “The larger issue is civility. As a nation, we have gotten meaner.”
Getting schoolchildren to stop using profanity seems a Sisyphean task. Still, the anti-cursing movement has grown in fits and starts in recent years, particularly as school administrators, parents and students themselves have looked to new ways to stop bullying. “If you call someone a bitch, that’s bullying right there,” said Nick Meinhardt, the eighth-grade student who is the president of the club that began Lott Middle School’s no-cursing movement.
Elsewhere, administrators at a high school in Hartford tried slapping $103 fines on students who cursed, but that effort was abandoned quickly, a school administrator said. They are still trying it in Texas. In October, a teenager who confronted another student with a profanity was hit with a $340 ticket.
Some experts say the notion that cursing leads to bullying is misguided. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently added a section on bullying to its policy statement on the pediatrician’s role in preventing youth violence, but cursing was not mentioned.
Anti-cursing efforts are simply not effective, said Timothy Jay, a psychology professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and the author of five books on language and behavior, including Why We Curse and Cursing in America. “There’s been swearing since the beginning of time,” he said. “If one of these things worked, we wouldn’t swear.” The anti-cursing movement is not unlike antidrug efforts that work on the premise that marijuana is a gateway drug. The real issues are deeper than just saying no. “We need to teach people how to deal with anger, not say just don’t do it,” Mr. Jay said. “That just deals with a symptom.”
Although Mike Dean, a Mobile County Commission member, voted to finance the anti-cursing program, he also called it a gimmick. Mr. Dean, 55, is more of an infrastructure guy. Five thousand dollars can buy a lot of playground equipment or pave a parking lot, he said. “In my day, they taught respect,” he said. “They used a paddle.”
Even McKay Hatch, who is now a senior at South Pasadena High School in California, is having a tough time sustaining interest in the national no-cursing club he started in 2007. The club used to be in high demand. McKay was a guest on morning news programs and The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. He hit the big time when he called a news conference last year after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. dropped the curse word heard around the world as he congratulated President Obama on the passage of the health care overhaul.
Although McKay’s father, Brent Hatch, says the movement (which he had trademarked) has gained a hundred clubs in schools and churches worldwide, and has 20,000 online members, a recent plan for a sixty-city tour fell through because enough money could not be raised.
And, though Mr. Hatch is still trying to recruit schools for the national Bullied No More tour, he concedes that interest has largely been limited to California and Arizona. And soon, his son will be off to college and the family no-cursing enterprise will fade. So father and son will make the most of their Valentine’s Day trip to Mobile, where they plan to show up at the county offices downtown for the curse-free proclamation, and then drive for about 45 minutes to Lott Middle School, with its 500 students.
This is not the first attack on bad language the Lott club has made. In December, it held an assembly and handed out no-cursing wristbands. Students signed pledges. Promises were made. But, in the halls last week, the no-cursing posters elicited eye rolls, particularly among eighth-grade boys.
Wayne Jenkins, 14, said he took the pledge in December and would be at the assembly. But he is not convinced that it is going to make a bit of difference. Cursing, he figures, is just too ingrained. “I have a four-year-old brother,” he said, “and he knows every cuss word there is.”

Rico says cursing does not lead to bullying; no bully who ever picked on him (and there were a few, when Rico was young) ever cursed him first, though Rico was known to curse them afterwards...