3 years ago I stopped swearing. (There are about maybe 5 times a year I use bad language) But on the whole I don't swear. This was tough because I'm a retired Marine.
Can you talk a bit more about changing your speech patterns? I talk like a backwoods hick and I feel it holds me back in life. I cuss a lot, too. It’s hard to be conscious about it.
Here is a detailed explanation, hopefully, this will help.
Four or five years ago, I was listing to NPR / Fresh Air and the topic I believe was about speech patterns. (I can’t find the episodes, please let me know if you have any luck.) They used President George W. Bush as an example. He had a tendency to use the word “awesome” with a high frequency. If he saw the Pope, he would describe it as awesome, if he went to a Nascar race, he would describe it as awesome. I honestly can’t remember, but something triggered me and I said to myself that I choose better words to describe events and or circumstances. (This is not a political commentary.)
Basically, I channeled myself to not use swear words. I don’t type swear words on the internet and do my best not to say them in public. I allow myself 10 swear words a year and generally only swear about 5 times a year. I swear to myself sometimes, but I don’t think that counts? It also helps cause my son was born, so he is not growing up in hearing me swear.
Generally, I feel that I can use better adjectives and adverbs to describe something to a person than falling back on a swear word. I also find that when I’m reading books, my vocabulary increases a little bit for the better. When I put a book down, my language seems to deteriorate just a little bit. At the end of the day great leaders, presidents, CEO are great communicators, and swearing in public isn’t a method they use to communicate.
I'm in the same boat (replace backwoods hick with degenerate bogan).
I visited two speech therapists about this, but both told me it's not their area of expertise (and subtly hinted that it's not a real problem that needs fixing).
I kept a journal for my _broken_ language habits over about 2 years. I'd then pick one to attack per month. Being conscious about it is hard, but it's doable if you actually make it a goal and track your progress.
Some of the ones I "successfully" killed:
- Stopped using me when my is correct.
- Stopped ending sentences in but (apparently, this is a super specific speech pattern local to my childhood suburb).
- Stopped defaulting to bought and learned to use brought (weirdly, I always knew they were different words when writing, but I would pronounce both as bought).
The one that alludes me:
- Pronouncing 'th' in certain words as 'ef'. Two examples of this are three and north. I've been trying to master this for over a year now (I'm fine with 'three' in most cases, but 'th' at the end of a word still kills me).
Out of curiousity: are you Irish? These patterns match some of my relatives, particularly ending sentences with "filler" words and the "th" pronounciation. I never thought about these as things that need fixing since they are just part of an accent (not suggesting you shouldn't change them if you feel like you'd prefer a different speech pattern).
I used to self censor, like cutting audio. “Sonova——itch” “mother f——er” and “Oh, S—-t”. It would get confused grins. Started when we had our first kid and they copied our swearing. However, I swear a lot due to work - there was a swearing culture tied to being authentic or something and I picked it back up all these years later.
This year I started Meatless Mondays.