In the face of careless driving, whatever happened to indifferent cursing? You know, cursing without the shopworn F-bomb? When a truck backed into the grille of my mom’s Cadillac, she said, “Well, isn’t he fresh?” At the time, I believed it was her only curse apart from “Jesus, Johnny,” which she uttered so often I thought I had dual first names. Mind you, at the time, I also thought that Labor Day—all those picnics, you know?—was meant to celebrate women about to give birth.
My father was a navy vet, so he surely possessed piquant profanity. Yet during his road rages, the worst he ever shouted was “Cowboy!” and, once or twice when his entire nervous system immolated, “Jackass.” I tried to explain to him that those words were not…
