My years in the Navy had me using the f-word throughout my conversations because, well, everyone else did. It was as frequent as “y’know” and had about the same emotional content.

When I transitioned to civilian I realized I needed to clean up my act. I had gone to a high school with a heavy Jewish population (we got the high holy days off, although officially they were “snow days”) so naturally my Yiddish had a fair number of impolite words. But hey, if it was just us goyim, who knew?

Naturally, God having a crappy sense of humor, one of my first civilian bosses was an Israeli.

At one point we were dealing with a crummy piece of software and I expressed my frustration. At length. I look up and see Giora’s expression, which could be described as “taken aback.” There was a moment of silence, after which he said, “I do not think that the software is that bad…” I apologized.