Destroyed With Lyrics and Pretty Music

If you had to give up one word that you use regularly, what would it be?

I’ve grown quite fond of the word represented by this picture. I like it and I have been using it a lot more liberally over the last year. That is not to say I didn’t use it when I was a Catholic school teacher. I just had to make sure I didn’t appear to be someone who used that word.

There’s strength in the word. It puts emphasis on what you’re trying to express. The idea that you feel passionately about what you’re saying comes across nicely with this word sprinkled in. Make a simple sentence with this word and put “you” after it and you have the ability to tell someone exactly how you feel about them.

Having said all that, as a writer, this is the word I would give up. I feel like there are more eloquent and creative ways to get your point across to someone. Take Taylor Swift for example. I’m listening my way through her “Speak Now” album and yesterday I listened to the song Dear John for the first time. It’s very obviously about John Mayer. And Taylor is obviously very pissed at him and how he treated her. That song was savage! She destroyed him with the lyrics and not a single F-bomb anywhere in the song. Just some well crafted lyrics set to pretty music. Swifties on Threads told me he said he was humiliated by the song. As he should be!

I started listening to her music because she wrote her own songs. And I’m writing my own stories too. Can’t set them to music and sing my words, nobody wants to hear that. But as I listen to more and more of her music, I realize I aspire to her level of pettiness, vengefulness, and all the other -nesses. If she can humiliate those who wronged her with lyrics clean enough to be played on the radio, I can do without the F-word.