cuss (n., v.): curse

I’ve recently taken to watching Gunsmoke, a western that ran on CBS from 1955 to 1975, making it the longest-running drama in television history. It’s fuckin’ great — before my first episode (which I DVRed more or less arbitrarily), I hadn’t realized that TV dramas had once been so strictly episodic. Today’s dramas often focus on long, gradually unfolding plotlines that extend over the course of the serial. Virtually every drama I can think of fits this mold, everything from hospital shows like ER and Grey’s Anatomy to soap-like shows like The O.C. and its ilk all the way to esoteric dramas like Dexter and Big Love. Even cop shows like Law & Order, which introduce a new case every week, like to incorporate longer story arcs about their characters’ relationships. But in the first episode of Gunsmoke I ever saw, one of the male leads named Newly met a woman at the beginning of the episode. He convinced her to stay in the town of Dodge City, they fell in love, they married, and she died. All within an hour. This rocked my world — you can’t just fucking DO that! — but it appears to be part of the show’s M.O. to introduce a story and wrap it up all in one episode.

Anyway. I realize now that mentioning all this has actually led me astray, because the show I really wanted to talk about was Bonanza, and one of its male leads, Hoss Cartwright. Hoss’s name is Hoss, as you may have noticed, which is a variant of “horse,” a fact which became clear when I saw part of this one episode where an inventor from Boston moved to town and referred to the big man as “Horse.” The funny thing about Hoss being named Hoss, though, is that the characters speak in a rhotic accent, the show being set in Nevada.

In fact, “hoss,” like “cuss,” is one of the few words where the southern, non-rhotic pronunciation has found its way into the general lexicon even among rhotic speakers. From a prescriptivist point of view, the word “cuss” doesn’t exist. There is only the word “curse,” and American Southerners with non-rhotic drawls pronounce it /k?s/. This r-dropping occurs in literally every word where the r is not followed by a vowel, yet, so far as I can tell, the only words where that pronunciation has become common among rhotic speakers are “curse” and to a far lesser extent, “horse.” Imagine Foghorn Leghorn saying, “I say boy, don’t you bark at that hearse from the porch!” Have we seen English words “bock,” “huss,” or “pautch” represented in the lexicon?

I was in a class once at Brown with a girl who objected strenuously to the casual use of “cuss” and insisted that the offender say “curse.” I was mildly surprised by this, though it’s not something I cared about enough to mention. As long as I’m on the subject, though, I figure I might as well address this: If saying things like “The past is gone, hoss — what you need now is some motherfucking pussy” is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Oh, P.S.: I decided to name my sack “Marshall Darling,” after the dad on Clarissa Explains It All: