by Rick Bayan
(July 1999) On a fair June afternoon somewhere in that vast vegetable patch known as the American Midwest, a young man lost his balance and toppled out of a canoe. As he hit the cold water in his street clothes, he promptly spewed a mouthful of pungent oaths into the fragrant spring breeze.
I can’t tell you how pungent his oaths were, or how many he spewed, because I wasn’t there and the newspaper accounts wouldn’t go into specifics. I CAN tell you that he had the misfortune to be overheard by some ladies and children who were paddling in the vicinity. Because of his momentary lapse in verbal decorum, our waterlogged friend was dragged to court and – are you ready for this? – sentenced to THREE MONTHS in a place where canoeing ranks low on the list of available amusements.
Meanwhile, a Canadian-born clergyman living in upstate New York learned that he would be denied U.S. citizenship because he had been arrested once, in the high recklessness of his youth, for possession of marijuana. He pleaded with the bureaucrats to reconsider his case, but he might as well have tried to move the Taj Mahal to Minneapolis. Exasperated and distraught, he finally wrote a letter denouncing his stiff-necked adversaries as “evil bastards.”
What happened next? The “evil bastards” made sure the letter was read by members of the clergyman’s congregation. Shocked by their pastor’s uncouth turn of phrase, the pious parishioners decided to send him packing. Now, suddenly jobless in an alien land, he faces deportation to the Great White North.
I cite these tales of woe not because I endorse the proliferation of profanity throughout an already profaned republic, but because both stories, occurring in such rapid succession, floored me with a one-two punch to that most prominent and fragile organ in my mental anatomy: my sense of justice. How could two ordinary people be made to suffer so grievously for perfectly reasonable responses to nasty predicaments?
When $20 million-a-film stars pummel us with profanity from the big screen, we comfort them with accolades and riches. They enjoy the company of gaudy lovers and obsequious chauffeurs; they dwell like sultans in many-roomed palaces and subtropical gardens. We giggle at the schoolboy wickedness of radio shock-jocks and never tire of their trash talk; we pay for books and magazines that revel in showing us the “f-word,” again and again, in case we’ve forgotten how to spell it.
Perched at the apex of the profanity pyramid are the hot standup comics who haunt trendy nightclubs and pay-cable stations. The funny thing is that there’s nothing funny about profanity. Our professional jesters typically use vile language as a kind of verbal Viagra: to boost the potency of flaccid material, to overpower rather than tickle the audience. Still, we snicker and applaud; the comic goes home a conqueror.
My point is that our professional promulgators of profanity – the actors, screenwriters, playwrights, successful comics, rock stars, rap artists, pop novelists and radio jockeys – have little to swear about. They might have to put up with lackluster room service now and then, or perhaps a peeping paparazzo behind the bushes, but on the whole they lead elegant and pampered lives. They spew their oaths gratuitously, without the justification of plunging from a canoe or being stymied by oafish bureaucrats. And we reward them with still more piles of shekels for the maintenance of their Bugatti collections and subterranean love grottos.
But when two low-status males let fly a few spontaneous, genuinely appropriate words of wrath, their lives are ruined beyond redemption. I detect the unmistakable stink of injustice here, don’t you?
Profanity is a linguistic safety valve: it keeps us from silently exploding with unverbalized, artery-popping rage. When our grocery bag tears open and lets a 48-ounce glass bottle of grape juice crash to the floor… when we’re caught in a zero-mph traffic jam on the way to our grandmother’s funeral… when a vertical stack of 28 VHS videotapes sways and collapses, moments after we successfully extricated the third one from the bottom… when America Online bids us “Goodbye” just as we’re putting the finishing touches on a masterly message-board post that took us nearly an hour to create… then profanity comes to our aid like General Pershing’s army arriving in France, like salvation to a sinner, like an antacid after an Italian dinner.
As a child of the Donna Reed suburbs, I grew up with an intense aversion to the mildest of bad language. I believed that anything with a title like “Damn Yankees” was strictly for unwholesome wretches who courted perdition through overindulgence in whiskey, poker, cigarettes and other mysterious urban vices. I was genuinely shocked when, in the midst of reciting a church creed, I was forced to intone the words, “He descended into HELL.” What kind of sleazy outfit was this, anyway?
College liberated my attitude for a few years, as I began to relish the lusty pleasures of a loosened tongue. My inner Neanderthal was coming to life. But once I earned my diploma, I rolled up my tongue again and put a decorous face on my words.
It was only about four years ago, when I first found myself at the mercy of a fiendish contrivance known as Microsoft Windows, that I began to seek regular solace in the hairy-chested vocabulary I had long ago abandoned. Microsoft gave me no alternative. When a normal screen suddenly and unaccountably transforms itself into a three-column format with decorative frames across the top and won’t transform itself back, no matter how many ridiculous little icons we click, a simple “Dang!” won’t cut the mustard. We require the verbal horsepower that only the baddest of bad four-letter expletives can deliver.
In fact, I soon exhausted the meager supply of epithets available to the modern speaker of English. Like an addict, I had to keep upping the dose to achieve maximum relief; I’d combine the basic four-letter words with more outlandish phrases of my own invention. My neighbors at work must have chuckled or trembled as they overheard me muttering dark imprecations at my evil screen, condemning to everlasting torment the thrice-damned sons of Beelzebub who insisted on capitalizing the first word of every line in my catalog copy.
Compared against the robust maledictions of the Elizabethans, who delighted in calling each other everything from “bull’s pizzle” to “whoreson gorbellied knave,” profanity in America – like so much else in our prematurely dilapidated culture – is a doltish and sorry spectacle. Most of it, curiously enough, centers around four institutions that we as a culture simultaneously revere and despise: sex, the human body, parents and religion.
The celebrated f-word and its variants have been made to work overtime as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection, and, in some quarters, the middle name of God’s only begotten son. (Yet, for some unknown reason, when they shorten it to an initial they always use the letter H.) What any of it has to do with copulation, or even common sense, is beyond me. Most of us look forward to the delights of the bedchamber, yet what do we say when we want to curse an adversary? We command him to enjoy those pleasures forthwith! Yes, as a punishment for your transgressions, may you experience the most delirious sensations known to the human body! (Thanks! Same to you, buddy.)
This clueless reasoning applies to our other expletives as well. When forced to confront the hard reality of a forgotten appointment or missed deadline, we typically invoke the end-product of our large intestines. When the office copier swallows three pages and traps them somewhere in its innards, we reckon that our wayward machine was the offspring of a she-dog. After dropping a critically important wing-nut into the hidden recesses of our car’s engine, we ask the creator of the universe to banish that wing-nut to the infernal regions, where it would entertain no hope of future salvation. No harp or feathered wings for that accursed nut; no romping amid the smiling cherubim and seraphim. Down it plunges into the murky and incinerating depths from which no wing-nut ever emerges – sort of like the recesses of the engine where we lost it in the first place.
Though I vent heartily in private, I still hesitate to bandy expletives before a live audience – whether in print or in person. Most of my wrath is directed at inanimate objects, anyway… objects that appear to delight in mocking my ineptitude: the aforementioned computer programs, copiers, wing-nuts and other instruments of Satan. I usually make an effort not to foul the air around a human face, except on rare occasions when it truly deserves to be fouled.
The way I see it, the overuse of profanity – especially our loutish, mind-numbing, contemporary Anglo-American brand of profanity – is a kind of full-frontal assault on the sensibilities of those who hear it. It kills innocence and strips the language of its native grace. It imposes our will on others, which at least partly explains its widespread popularity. People who pepper their speech with gratuitous profanity, whether in person or on a big screen, are figuratively shoving their private parts in our faces. There’s a time to let it out and a time to zip it up.
The two unfortunates who were caught with their verbal pants down, in the Midwest and upstate New York, had every right to let it out. Unlike much of what we hear on the streets or in the theaters, their language was admirably appropriate to their predicaments. Their vindictive punishments tell me that our society has split into two extreme camps on the issue of profanity, as it has with abortion, gun control, and a diet low in saturated fats.
Why does it have to be all or none? Why do we have to choose between bacon cheeseburgers and alfalfa sprouts? It’s time we recognized that a little indulgence in salty language can be beneficial to our health. And that too much of it can make us sick.
The next time my computer wantonly decides to insert bullets down the left margin, I should be free to retaliate with a blast from the full orchestra of my vocabulary. And I shouldn’t have to risk incarceration or deportation if someone happens to be strolling past my cubicle.
