[Midweek Edition] Ultra-brief Review: CUSS CONTROL – James O’Connor
An Ultra-brief Review of
Cuss Control:
The Complete Book On How to Curb Your Cursing.
James O’Connor.
Paperback: iUniverse, 2006.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
Reviewed by Chris Smith.
One of the most peculiar books to cross my desk in the last few months is James O’Connor’s CUSS CONTROL: THE COMPLETE BOOK ON HOW TO CURB YOUR CURSING. I was intrigued by O’Connor’s exploration of why we swear and what it means. As followers of Christ, we should be concerned with controlling our tongues and not being coformed to the way of the world, but these tasks are much bigger than eliminating cussing. Indeed, a legalistic elimination of swearing can quickly become a moralistic sort of whitewashing that addresses external behaviors without dealing with the twistedness of the heart (“out of which the mouth speaks”). Thus, despite the fine work on the social meaning of swearing, I find that O’Connor’s arguments against swearing are not particularly convincing.
