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MY FATHER speaks his own language. A hillbilly twang of the Looney Tunes dialect—Foghorn Leghorn, Yosemite Sam—mixed with the African-American jive of the dirtiest comedians—Redd Foxx or Richard Pryor. His swearing is part of a well-oiled machine, except when a driver cuts him off—then higher-octane terms explode from his mouth. He cuts words in half, stresses whichever syllable he wants. Verbs become nouns and vice versa. He throws in song lyrics, movie quotes, even slogans from TV commercials. It all swirls together and all you can do is try to keep up.

I tried. Sometimes we could speak at his pace. Other times, he'd lose me on aSanford and Son reference, and our dialogue became a one-man show.

"I don't know where he got that pig language from," my grandmother says."None of the other boys talk like that."

He gave all of my mother's sisters and my female cousins flirty, construction-worker-on-a-coffee-break nicknames: baby, suga', sweets, momma, girl, honey. He calls my wife, Vanessa,"Van Halen," and when he met my brother's girlfriend, Lola, he spelled out her name, just like The Kinks.

In a letter to my mother from Vietnam, written in his scratchy mish-mash of upper and lower case letters, he called her"his little girl" and said"let's not go spoiling this by telling Maddy." Maddy being his fiancée at the time. He asked her,"Can you dig it? You gotta be jivin' me. Hold on, momma, I'm comin' home soon."

He is perverted, but in a way that no one in our family seems to mind. He can pinch his sister-in-law's ass or make a sly comment about the perkiness of her breasts and it doesn't seem to offend anyone. That's the reputation he's established, and the one we've all come to expect.

As a kid, I would hear snippets of my father's language everywhere: Other men on the sidelines of my soccer or football games, burly attendants at the Hess station around the corner from our house, and the slick or heroic guys in mob and war movies on HBO. Though none of these characters spoke exactly like my father, they shared similar phrases: