How wicked our tongues can be when they are uncontrolled! Following my mother's teaching, she always warned us kids to be careful of what we said especially when angered, as we would eventually come to regret it.
Another of her gems was to never put anything in writing that could be used against you at a later date, like a hostile letter written in frustration to a sister that, said sister could keep and call you to task on years after the fact.
My mothers mother had taught her that of all the plans we sit and write for ourselves, there was a tiny little man with a very big eraser following behind and rubbing out all our carefully laid plans.
The message: live for today, arrange for tomorrow but don't count on that agenda turning out the way you imagine it will because your actions do not always speak louder than your words.
Words are all powerful and once heard they have the power to never be unheard and you retain them all the days of your life.
  Consider the times you were punished by a parent.
You remember being struck but you have long since forgotten the pain the blow caused, but a single negative word or careless comment made by your folks is engraved in your living memory forever as is the anguish associated with it.
We are creatures of emotion and self-centred habit, as we routinely think about ourselves this often leads to the inevitable exchange of words that mark the difficulties in our personal connections with others, especially patriarch/child, sibling and spousal relationships.
Is the dilemma that we have just never learned the proper way to converse with each other or is it something as fundamental as letting our emotions rule our tongues instead of the other way round.
I have learned that there are as many challenging types of communication as there are different types of communicators.
My mother is careful and even when upset, never says something she knows she will regret or that will hurt another; while my brother tells it like he sees it without regard of anyone else's feelings.
I tend to be in the middle of those two extremes.
Which one are you?   Is daily discourse and the type of communicator we become a learned trait that starts with our relatives and close family kin, migrating to teachers and similar exchanges with the friends we make along life's journey or is it part of our eventual personality.
We are not taught formal articulation as babies or children, we simply watch and listen to the people about us that make up our immediate world and from that, we learn the right and wrongs of conversation.
Because of where we first learned to talk, we have inherited transmission problems.
If a parent habitually swears, you can expect the child will do the same and that habit will not alter as an adult but may remain the same or will become even more offensive because the person either does not see why it is wrong or will refuse to change.
Since so much of our spoken intercourse with one another is learned from those who have influence over us at an early age, then is reinforced by social norms, how can we learn the task of guarding our speech to improve and change our bad habits? If silence is not a suitable strategy, what can we adopt that will work for us and be easy enough for us to remember and act upon.
  Truthfully, I have often wondered at Nuns.
They seemed to have mastered something the rest of us are still grappling with.
To ask one of them is to get a discourse on the Lord and religious beliefs, as well as personal choice.
They act on it as a moral principle.
Suppose you just want to 'clean up' your language, what then? The truth is that we become like the people we spend most of our time with and they have the best or worst impact on us because their attitudes directly affect ours.
One friend I have is profoundly negative and when it gets too much for me to handle, I repeat the word 'negative' over again after everything he says until he realizes what he is saying and that I don't want to hear it anymore.
Only then does he consider and stop.
  Gaining control of one's lingo and dialogue is a highly individual decision and you have to find your own way to go about doing it.
One trick that has worked for me is constantly reminding myself of this mannerism I am challenging myself to change.
Just being aware of it on a continual basis and recognizing the situations that cause my bad language like sudden frustration, anger, annoyances, etc seems to help reinforce the idea of the shift in thinking and acting I need to make.
That encouragement helps but this is a learned behaviour and it will take time to alter so working at it on a daily basis to the point of remembering it at least once per hour, will eventually effect the correction I will make.
Then I will finally emerge from my narrow-minded cocoon into a beautiful butterfly whose speech reflects her good looks!