Home and other 4-letter words

When you're at college, you live your life. No parents are around to nag you, give you curfews or make you clean. Then the holidays roll around and it's once again time to return to the nest from whence you came. This week's column comes to you straight from the front lines in Wisconsin where I am home for Thanksgiving. Like most, I have to readjust to my parents' rules in attempts to slide under their radar while trying to not get yelled at. \nOne of the primary and drastic alterations that I always have to make is in my language. I do have quite the extensive vocabulary and feel comfortable using words like "cornucopia" in everyday discourse, but once in a while, I let one of those four-letter words slip in. Once in a while, for me, ends up being a lot. But here in Wisconsin, every one of those four letter words that I forget to censor generates protests ranging from "language" to "Jamieson Hawkins, don't use those words in this house" from my mother and father. \nI don't think I'm alone on this one, either. Just the other day, I was talking with my best friend, Julia, about how difficult it is to censor yourself once you get home. She informed me that she too has been having "vocabulary-induced" altercations with her parents. In order to avoid swearing, Julia was subscribing to a strategic tactic involving substitutions. Saying things like "what the 'F'" instead of the obvious alternative, Julia claims she was not committing any infraction because, after all, F is just a letter. But despite her efforts, Julia's parents yelled at her for a poorly executed substitution which still sounded vulgar. Her mother argued that if in fact the letter "F" is just the result of a random selection from the alphabet, why not instead choose to use "what the 'A'" or "B" or even "C?" Julia was unconvinced by her mother's reasoning.\nGoing home is like stepping out of the magical OZ (IU) and returning to Kansas (or in my case, Wisconsin) where swearing is not allowed, and my mother does not understand why I would continually use up my money in weekly purchases of Miller Lite. \nDon't get me wrong, I love going home. Especially for Thanksgiving, which every year brings visits from my Uncle Gary and Aunt Sue. It's a sure bet that Uncle Gary will entertain us at some point by sticking something up his nose. This year, Gary's use of a potato was, in my opinion, true comedic genius. \nGoing home is nice. You see your family, the friends you have left over from high school and get to reminisce in a town you couldn't wait to leave. I only wish that coming home didn't mean you have to suddenly snap out of those social norms of college (to which you have become so accustomed) and purposely revert back to forgotten home regimes. Because, while "what the 'F'" is admittedly highly suggestive, F is just a letter. \n So here is my opinion, and I encourage you to all show your parents this column informing them that I am an authority on the subject and should therefore be taken seriously. Swearing is a fact of life, and parents just need to accept that. We come into our own in college and begin to become the people we are meant to be. So if we want to undermine the validity of our speech by inserting four-letter words, perhaps this should be one more of those lessons we'll just have to learn the hard way. That, and always get your work done before eating turkey. The tryptophan gets me every year.