As noted in the last entry, I am passionately a logophile, a word lover, with Shakespeare and Joyce my votes for the two top celebrants of our language. I am also mostly a liberal from my college teaching days, though 25 years of court work tempered those tendencies and gave me an equally passionate detestation of street language, not at all the authentic nitty-gritty but the illiterate, dull boredom of the, uhm, word challenged. Which is why I was particularly interested in The Week's summary of Daniel Henninger's Wall Street Journal editorial on a recent court ruling involving the FCC and sudden profane/obscene utterances on, say, MTV award shows, rockers and rappers being excessively prone to poor language skills (page 12 of the 29 June 2007 issue of The Week). Henninger chided the "leftist"--why not "literate"--print media for still mostly refusing to print the offending words, using asterisks or that hodgepodge of symbols banged at random from the top row of a typewriter. His point was "Vulgarities debase language and express nothing but the speaker's lack of imagination and self-control. They offend. They're in bad taste." Which last two sentences explain why they're wielded as weapons.
As an ex-college English teacher, I am fussy enough to make the distinction between those two categories, profane referring to the sacred or religious, obscene referring to physical body functions. And I have wielded both kinds, before my language piety is impeached, as Cheney should be. I was teaching in Illinois in the late Sixties with several students from the Chicago area in my classes, a riproaring decade with the Vietnam War (another of those undeclared debacles we slid into), like the notorious alleged Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." During the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, infamous for Daly's strong-armed response to protesters, I got eyewitness reports, and even downstate WIU had sit-ins and the SDS churning campus politics. It was a curiously exhilarating, exhausting decade.
One of the most inflammatory topics was, of course, freedom of speech, meaning mainly the use of the F word, which had the same quaintly incindiary power as long hair then. Other than the strategy of deliberate provocation and boring repetition, my major objection to the word remains the same today, almost 40 years later: the very sound is as brutal as the act the word describes. I know it has been in our language a long time--since somewhere between 1400 and 1600, according to usual source efforts--and I know there are those like a very good friend who make creatively funny variations on it, the way super got -califragilisticexpialidocious added to it, as well as hippy sorts like Dharma's parents who view/use it so commonly as to make it inocuous. Except that it's not inocuous, and I still remember the startling boredom of a defendant who used it and its variants, none creative, 47 times, as I recall, during a plea, which plea was around 15 minutes perhaps. I also know its brutality is why it's such a potent swear word, a favorite of violent men for a reason. That reason is best summed up by Pocahontas in Matthew Sharpe's satirical Jamestown when she's describing "ceremonial state-sponsored log sculptures that surround the fire" of "the pre-hunt pep rally," especially "hunting-type face" #3, and then skips the rest: "The one with semi-closed eyelids, red flared nostrils, parted lips, scratches on its flushed face, and tousled hair damp with perspiration is the sculpture of just made love to the wife of my enemy in the dirt against her will while her husband lay freshly murdered not ten feet away." There's your F word in any warfare right up to our present.
So that is why I actually quit subscribing to HBO, not just because of its frequent program repetition but mainly because its "acclaimed" shows like Deadwood and Entourage lard their scripts with the F word and its variants so heavily, the writers could be accused of cholesterol abuse. My ears and brain are automatically programmed to shut down at the F word, like the cell phone dead spaces causing anxiety in the Vonage commercials. I would also declare Deadwood historically inaccurate as to its language, but that makes no real difference. It's all that dead space of the F word. You can imagine how little I hear of rap and hip hop and what movies put me to sleep, including most recently The Departed.
Take your lesson from Falstaff (I Henry IV 2.5.226-229): "Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish--O, for breath to utter what is like thee!--you tailor's yard, you sheath, you bowcase, you vile standing tuck--"
Leave a comment