Curses!

A true story: the little voodoo doll I brought back from New Orleans for my bunnysitter was to help with her career, and right away she got another job. Now everyone wants to borrow it!

Do curses work? When I told the story of the voodoo doll to a friend, she said she and a coworker once put a curse on another coworker they disliked intensely. They just did it for a joke, but she immediately broke her ankle and missed a week of work. Another friend tells me that his father once cursed someone, and the person died in a plane crash not long after that. His father (who was prominently featured in The Godfather II) resolved never to curse anyone again. 

I am not talking about vulgar language. The F-word is so overused that it hardly means anything. It is just an adjective people throw around carelessly. The S-word, which comes from an Anglo-Saxon word for diarrhea, is just as vulgar and overused. (Nobody seems to definitively know where the F-word comes from, but one guess is the imperative for "to do" in Latin, which is fac.) True cursing involves holy persons, sacrilege, and a stated hope that some harm befalls the cursed person. People might not think about what they are saying when they say, "G** d*** you!" but they are actually wishing for your eternal damnation. Obviously this upsets God a lot more than using the F-word; I don't know what He thinks about that, but I will go out on a limb and say He isn't fond of people asking Him to send other people to Hell just because they cut them off in traffic.

In my experience, Europeans (at least in Spain, France, Greece and especially Italy) swear this way much more often than Americans. We are not very original with our cursing while they have some truly colorful phrases that I will not repeat. (The most shocking one is something my father once told me, a Sicilian phrase that involves fornication and the Virgin Mary.) I am not sure why American culture never got into true cursing as much, but that is just as well. I have a bit of a temper and am glad my first impulse when angry is to drop the F-bomb rather than wishing some enormous harm upon the object of my anger down to the fifth generation. Because, judging from the stories above, you just might get what you wish for!

Famous Hat