Maledict<I>oratory</I>
The high costs of low
language.
Sunday, Jan. 14, 1996: A
day that will live in--well, not infamy, exactly. Blasphemy would be closer to
it.
Early that afternoon, the
Pittsburgh Steelers defeated the Indianapolis Colts to win the American
Football Conference championship. Linebacker Greg Lloyd, accepting the trophy
in front of a national television audience, responded with enthusiasm. "Let's
see if we can bring this damn thing back here next year," he said, "along with
the [expletive] Super Bowl."
A few
hours later, Michael Irvin of the Dallas Cowboys offered this spirited defense
of his coach on TV after his team won the National Football Conference title:
"Nobody deserves it more than Barry Switzer. He took all of this [expletive]
."
Iwatched those episodes, and, incongruous as it may sound,
I thought of Kenneth Tynan. Britain's great postwar drama critic was no fan of
American football, but he was a fan of swearing. Thirty years earlier, almost
to the week, Tynan was interviewed on BBC television in his capacity as
literary director of Britain's National Theater and asked if he would allow the
theater to present a play in which sex took place on stage. "Certainly," he
replied. "I think there are very few rational people in this world to whom the
word '[expletive]' is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally
forbidden."
It turned out there were a
few more than Tynan thought. Within 24 hours, resolutions had been introduced
in the House of Commons calling for his prosecution on charges of obscenity,
for his removal as a theater official, and for censure of the network for
allowing an obscene word to go out on the airwaves. Tynan escaped punishment,
but he acquired a public reputation for tastelessness that he carried for the
rest his life. To much of ordinary Britain, he became the man who had said
"[expletive]" on the BBC.
Neither
Greg Lloyd nor Michael Irvin was so stigmatized. "It's live television," NBC
Vice President Ed Markey said, rationalizing the outbursts. "It's an emotional
moment. These things happen." Irvin wasn't about to let that stand. "I knew
exactly what I was saying," he insisted later. "Those of you who can't believe
I said it--believe it."
Swearing isn't the only public act that Western
civilization condones today but didn't 30 years ago. But it is one of the most
interesting. It is everywhere, impossible to avoid or tune out.
I am sitting in a meeting at the office, talking with a colleague about a
business circumstance that may possibly go against us. "In that case, we're
[expletive] ," he says. Five years ago, he would have said "screwed." Twenty
years ago, he would have said, "We're in big trouble." Societal tolerance of
profanity requires us to increase our dosage as time goes on.
I am walking along a suburban street, trailing a class of pre-schoolers who
are linked to each other by a rope. A pair of teen-agers passes us in the other
direction. By the time they have reached the end of the line of children, they
have tossed off a whole catalog of obscenities I did not even hear until I was
well into adolescence, let alone use in casual conversation on a public street.
I am talking to a distinguished professor of public policy about a
foundation grant. I tell her something she wasn't aware of before. In 1965, the
appropriate response was "no kidding." In 1996, you do not say "no kidding." It
is limp and ineffectual. If you are surprised at all, you say what she says:
"No shit."
What word is taboo in middle-class America in 1996? There
are a couple of credible candidates: The four-letter word for "vagina" remains
off-limits in polite conversation (although that has more to do with feminism
than with profanity), and the slang expression for those who engage in oral sex
with males is not yet acceptable by the standards of office-meeting
etiquette.
But aside from a few
exceptions, the supply of genuinely offensive language has dwindled almost to
nothing as the 20th century comes to an end; the currency of swearing has been
inflated to the brink of worthlessness. When almost anything can be said in
public, profanity ceases to exist in any meaningful way at all.
That
most of the forbidden words of the 1950s are no longer forbidden will come as
news to nobody: The steady debasement of the common language is only one of
many social strictures that have loosened from the previous generation to the
current. What is important is that profanity served a variety of
purposes for a long time in Western culture. It does not serve those purposes
any more.
What purposes? There are a couple of plausible answers. One
of them is emotional release. Robert Graves, who wrote a book in the 1920s
called The Future of Swearing , thought that profanity was the adult
replacement for childhood tears. There comes a point in life, he wrote, when
"wailing is rightly discouraged, and groans are also considered a signal of
extreme weakness. Silence under suffering is usually impossible." So one
reaches back for a word one does not normally use, and utters it without undue
embarrassment or guilt. And one feels better--even stimulated.
The anthropologist Ashley
Montagu, whose Anatomy of Swearing , published in 1967, is the definitive
modern take on the subject, saw profanity as a safety valve rather than a
stimulant, a verbal substitute for physical aggression. When someone swears,
Montagu wrote, "potentially noxious energy is converted into a form that
renders it comparatively innocuous."
One
could point out, in arguing against the safety-valve theory, that as America
has grown more profane in the past 30 years, it has also grown more violent,
not less. But this is too simple. It isn't just the supply of dirty words that
matters, it's their emotive power. If they have lost that power through
overuse, it's perfectly plausible to say that their capacity to deter
aggressive behavior has weakened as well.
But there is something else important to say about
swearing--that it represents the invocation of those ideas a society considers
powerful, awesome, and a little scary.
I'm not sure there is an
easy way to convey to anybody under 30, for example, the sheer emotive force
that the word "[expletive]" possessed in the urban childhood culture of 40
years ago. It was the verbal link to a secret act none of us understood but
that was known to carry enormous consequences in the adult world. It was the
embodiment of both pleasure and danger. It was not a word or an idea to mess
with. When it was used, it was used, as Ashley Montagu said, "sotto
voce , like a smuggler cautiously making his way across a forbidden
frontier."
In that
culture, the word "[expletive]" was not only obscene, it was profane, in the
original sense: It took an important idea in vain. Profanity can be an act of
religious defiance, but it doesn't have to be. The Greeks tempted fate by
invoking the names of their superiors on Mount Olympus; they also swore upon
everyday objects whose properties they respected but did not fully understand.
"By the Cabbage!" Socrates is supposed to have said in moments of stress, and
that was for good reason. He believed that cabbage cured hangovers, and as
such, carried sufficient power and mystery to invest any moment with the
requisite emotional charge.
These days, none of us believes in cabbage in the way
Socrates did, or in the gods in the way most Athenians did. Most Americans tell
poll-takers that they believe in God, but few of them in a way that would make
it impossible to take His name in vain: That requires an Old Testament piety
that disappeared from American middle-class life a long time ago.
Nor do we believe in sex
any more the way most American children and millions of adults believed in it a
generation ago: as an act of profound mystery and importance that one did not
engage in, or discuss, or even invoke, without a certain amount of excitement
and risk. We have trivialized and routinized sex to the point where it just
doesn't carry the emotional freight it carried in the schoolyards and bedrooms
of the 1950s.
Many
enlightened people consider this to be a great improvement over a society in
which sex generated not only emotion and power, but fear. For the moment, I
wish to insist only on this one point: When sexuality loses its power to awe,
it loses its power to create genuine swearing. When we convert it into a casual
form of recreation, we shouldn't be surprised to hear linebackers using the
word "[expletive]" on national television.
To profane something, in other words, one must believe in
it. The cheapening of profanity in modern America represents, more than
anything else, the crumbling of belief. There are very few ideas left at this
point that are awesome or frightening enough for us to enforce a taboo against
them.
The instinctive response
of most educated people to the disappearance of any taboo is to applaud it, but
this is wrong. Healthy societies need a decent supply of verbal taboos and
prohibitions, if only as yardsticks by which ordinary people can measure and
define themselves. By violating these taboos over and over, some succeed in
defining themselves as rebels. Others violate them on special occasions to
derive an emotional release. Forbidden language is one of the ways we remind
children that there are rules to everyday life, and consequences for breaking
them. When we forget this principle, or cease to accept it, it is not just our
language that begins to fray at the edges.
What do we do about it?
Well, we could pass a law against swearing. Mussolini actually did that. He
decreed that trains and buses, in addition to running on time, had to carry
signs that read "Non bestemmiare per l'onore d'Italia." ("Do not swear for the
honor of Italy.") The commuters of Rome reacted to those signs exactly as you
would expect: They cursed them.
What Mussolini could not
do, I am reasonably sure that American governments of the 1990s cannot do, nor
would I wish it. I merely predict that sometime in the coming generation,
profanity will return in a meaningful way. It served too many purposes for too
many years of American life to disappear on a permanent basis. We need it.
And so I am reasonably
sure that when my children have children, there will once again be words so
awesome that they cannot be uttered without important consequences. This will
not only represent a new stage of linguistic evolution, it will be a token of
moral revival. What the dirty words will be, God only knows.
