“‘Most parents don’t want their school-age tots hearing the cursing kids on “South Park,” but it might be beneficial.

“That’s the word from comic book author Gerard Jones, who has written for ‘Pokemon,’ ‘The X-Men’ and ‘Spider-Man,’ and is the author of a new book, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes And Make-Believe Violence (Perseus).

Although conventional wisdom suggests that normal kids will curse up a storm if they hear Eric Cartman or Bart Simpson say it first, Jones says evidence suggests the opposite.

He says pre-teen kids are very concerned with doing the right things, and, if anything, shows like ‘South Park’ teach them how not to behave.

As a result, he thinks that the cartoon cursing might be cathartic for kids and swear them off swearing themselves.

Fuckin’ A, dude!

…Though receiving their filthy language pre-packaged in this way will no doubt rob kids of that wonderful fillip of mischievousness they’d feel had they been left to discover “fart face” and “bullshit” and other sinister utterances by themselves (via older siblings, or bathroom-stall graffiti, or overheard snippets of some HBO show or other, etc.).

When I was a kid, for instance, my friends and I would gather in our “fort” (a treehouse we’d built out of materials stolen from local construction sites) and go over a particular week’s array of zesty verbal treasures. “Is it pronounced ‘shit’ or ‘shite’? — because I’ve heard it both ways. My sister’s dating this Irish guy, and the other day he said to her and my Dad, ‘everything that wanker Ted Kennedy says is ‘shite'”!

–“It’s ‘shit,’ stupid. And who’s Ted Kennedy, anyway?”

–“Yeah, and what’s a ‘wanker‘”?

Ah, unlimited semiosis….

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