COMMENTARY: The Curse of a Strong Economy

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Dale Hanson Bourke is publisher of RNS.) (UNDATED) Times are good. They are so good that about every other person I meet has just been given several million dollars by a mysterious investment source to develop a Web site based on his or her weird hobby. I lay awake nights […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is publisher of RNS.)

(UNDATED) Times are good. They are so good that about every other person I meet has just been given several million dollars by a mysterious investment source to develop a Web site based on his or her weird hobby.


I lay awake nights trying to think of some idea goofy enough to present to these ubiquitous money people. “Don’t do a business plan,” an in-the-know friend advises. “They just want one paragraph.”

Now I’m not an economist, but there has to be something wrong when a boatload of money is being given to someone who has scribbled a business proposal on the back of an envelope. Still, I wouldn’t mind being on the receiving end.

The problem is I’m just so darn traditional. I have an MBA. I spent years thinking it was not a good thing to see a negative number on the bottom line. I would actually want to propose something that made money, which, of course, is not the point at all these days. So I would have to come up with something so absurd that I wouldn’t be able to stop giggling as I presented it.

That’s a big problem. You can still be in high school. You can be wearing jeans and a T-shirt. You can smell. All of these attributes make you attractive to dotcom investors. But you may not giggle. They have their standards.

I was just about to give up on the whole fantasy when I read that consulting is also making a comeback. Remember the ’80s when everyone was a consultant? Even I was a consultant in the ’80s and it really was pretty cool to fly in, tell people what to do and then just leave.

So I turned my attention to what I might consult about. Soon I came back to the old problem. Companies aren’t looking for consultants who can make money for them. They want people who help spend all the money they just received from their IPO. I hit the giggle wall again.

Then I was paging through my Forbes magazine, looking for some leading economic indication that making a profit might soon come back into style, when I found the answer. Some companies are paying $1,000 an hour for a curse consultant. No, not the voodoo kind of curse, a nasty word curse.

Cleaning up potty mouths for $1,000 an hour? I could do that.

I could be quite serious about this type of consulting, in fact. I am a reformed curser myself, someone who understands the importance of carefully choosing my expletives.


When I was growing up, “golly” and “gee” were as wild as the language got in my home. Then I went to spend a week with my grandparents, who had a different view of what constituted swearing.

To them, “golly,” “gosh,” “gee” and a variety of other words were simply close substitutes for “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” They would have none of it. For the first few days of my stay I was rendered mute by their fundamentalist view of swearing.

Then I realized they had no problem using a whole other variety of words not allowed in my parents’ house. Being farmers, they considered all words describing excrement to be fair game. Suddenly I was saying “sh-” to begin and end every sentence. Sh-, I was really getting into it.

By the time I returned home, I was an addict. I had a certifiable potty mouth. That is, until my mother pulled out a giant bar of soap and cured me.

There are probably some OSHA rules about sticking soap in people’s mouths, but I still think I’d be pretty good at curse consulting. The key, I’ve found, is all about substitution. Find a word you can spit out with real fervor, one that really shows you are ticked off. Then spew it at the right time and with the proper inflection.

I’m thinking “dotcom” has a nasty ring to it.

DEA END BOURKE

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