Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! Read Online Free PDF

power of the words. It was my “Yankee Doodle” moment. I felt I was helping to redefine those words.
    The Penn & Teller organization is just maggoty with people from Jewish backgrounds (atheist now), and we’ve got gays coming out our ass, so to speak. We have people of Irish and Italian descent and, yup, we’ve had a Canadian or two. People tend to work with us for a long time, so there’s not much turnover. Most everyone has worked with us at least ten years, and a bunch have been working with us for over twenty years. We’re a close-knit group that looks a little bit like America, or at least parts of it.
    I don’t think there is an obscenity that hasn’t been said by and to every one of our co-workers. We’re all comfortable with each other and we all trust each other. Anything said in anger is said sincerely, honestly and quietly. There’s not a lot of yelling around us unless it’s a joke.
    We do joke. And the jokes are sincerely Sarah Silverman. There isn’t one iota of real hate behind any of it—at one point I got sick of it.
    Several years ago, I was sitting around with two of my closest friends: rob pike from Google (then at Bell Labs) and Lawrence O’Donnell from MSNBC (then producer and writer on
The West
Wing
). I did a show called
Bullshit!
so y’all know how much I can swear, but unless you know rob and LOD, you don’t think of them as using a lot of obscenity. But back then when we were talking, it was a rare sentence that lacked a “fuck.” LOD and I were the worst. The two of us were once in a cab together in New York talking about what kind of picture hanger to use on a wall. There was no anger and no tension, but the New York Fucking City cabdriver said he had never heard people swear as much as us.
    The three of us decided to stop swearing. But we weren’t going to talk baby talk. We would not turn “shit” into “shoot.” We would never do “freaking” or “frigging.” We would take out all the religious swears. I used to say “goddamn” in our show all the time; I was proud of how many times I said it in our show. I said it for blasphemy. The idea was to show the words meant nothing to me. I felt it proved I was an atheist. I said “Jesus Christ” all the time too. Then I had children. These were children I wanted to bring up without all the god hate and baggage. So, why would they hear me saying a meaningless name all the time? So that came out of our show and out of my daily life. I’d sometimes catch myself saying “Jiminy Cricket,” but I tried not to. “Oh my god” became “my word.” That was a powerful one. It seems that many believe that “my word” is “my lord” with one letter change. Or that it stands for “oh my word of god.” That etymology bothers me, but only a little. I use it as giving my word. Swearing to god means nothing to me, but I want my word to mean something. I don’t know where I come down on “oh my goodness.” It seems to me like that’s a pretty clear euphemism for “OMG,” and it would be better to go with “oh my word,” I suppose, but I like “oh my goodness.” There’s a purity to that. We non-swearing boys found that “ouch” worked pretty well when one dropped a hammer on one’s toe: you didn’t really need “motherfucker” then. As part of our no-baby-talk rule, we still used “fuck” to talk about fucking and “shit” to talk about shit. We were okay with “dick” for our penises, but not for Kreskin. He was an untalented mentalist. Not knowing which word would be worse to call him, we couldn’t talk about him for a while. When you’re not talking about the whole person, “asshole” doesn’t come up that much. Same with “pussy” and the like. It was fine for sex talk, but no more false metonymy on any of that.
    The most surprising result was taking out the word “bullshit.” “Bullshit” is good-natured. It’s joking around. It has a colloquial playful feeling. Replace “bullshit”