Calumny's culmination.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Unplugged - Column

When I was about seven--which was deemed the vaunted, if arbitrary, "age of reason" in my Catholic school--I finally got a look-see at the actual Ten Commandments. Besides being disturbed by God's massive insecurity, so obvious in the first three commandments, I was amazed not to find "Thou shalt not swear." Though swearing could reasonably fit under #2's name-in-vain rubric or #8's bearing-false-witness clause, I had expected to find something as clear as #5's "Thou shalt not kill." In our house, using bad words was a big sin, and I had tasted my share of gritty Lava bar soap.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

We were also never allowed to tell anyone to shut up. When I was five, my grandmother was on an Easter visit, and she was supervising me in my Saturday morning chores. It was a gorgeous spring morning, and I was resentfully dusting my mom's beloved, heavily laden three-tiered knick-knack table so I could get outside to my bike. My grandmother told me I had missed a leg. I told her to shut up. In the horrified stillness, she asked, "Did you just tell me to shut up?"

"No," I told her, "I was talking to God."

It still makes me cringe.

And we were never allowed to call anyone Stupid. Ever.

"Even if they are?" I asked.

Never.

Years later when I watched A Fish Called Wanda , I saw what my parents must have thought would happen if you called someone stupid. Kevin Kline plays Otto, a weapons man in a diamond heist who fancies himself intellectual, but is actually quite stupid. If anyone references his stupidity, he warns ominously, "Don't call me stupid," and can be triggered into homicidal apoplexy, physical torture, and angelfish eating.

Perhaps these family rules against swearing, telling someone to shut up, or calling someone stupid were my parents' home-schooled civics lesson intended to make my brothers, sister, and me good citizens. For the most part, I have been able to abide by the spirit of those formative rules, at least with my outside voice.

But listening to my 100 percent fact-free, Fox-infused tea-bagging fellow citizens, I feel as if I am foaming at the mouth in an Otto-men empire, barely holding back a good string of blush-inducing invective.

"Why...