Watch Your Language! (Part II)
Part I concluded with Rhett Butler, in Gone With The Wind, uttering the earth-shattering, or rather Hays Code-shattering, “damn.” Will Hays’ hallowed censorship code had been pierced. Gradually, it would be ripped to shreds.
“Damn,” as in ESPN’s The Best Damn Sports Show, is at one end of the foul language spectrum, with robust obscenities at the other. “Darn” was what one articulated when angry or frustrated during America’s age of innocence.
Expressions like “Screw you!” pass under most people’s radar, as does Bernard Godlberg’s use of “screw” as a verb in the title of his book, 110 People Who Are Screwing Up America. Half a century ago, Goldberg’s title would have been something along the lines of: 110 People Who Are Befouling America.
When civility and good taste still prevailed, a screw was something found in a hardware store; its employment as a sexual verb was reserved for private conversation.
Along came the revolution, the great adolescent rebellion of the ’60s, which produced a social upheaval of monumental proportions.
Centuries of struggle to dignify the American branch of our species suddenly went into reverse. In Freudian language, it was the triumph of the id over the superego.
Freud is a name that holds little meaning for most young people of this age, even though they may be using such terms as ego, id, and superego; these are constructs Freud introduced to divide up the mind in his structural theory.
The id is the mind’s pit, the reservoir of our base instincts and primitive drives. The superego is the moral/ethical component of the personality. Ego, the I, what one is, does a balancing act between the id and superego. Hopefully, the superego, one’s conscience, will grow at the expense of the id. “Where id was, there shall ego be [a well-rounded I],” wrote Freud in 1923. But you have to work at it to make it happen. Superego development is essential to the ego’s growth.
In the past, societal edicts, stemming from superego-derived controls, kept foul language in check and out of public discourse. But the national superego isn’t what it ued to be.
Today we hear the f-word and the s-word on radio, television, and in the movies. And the a-word, b-word, c-word…
The a-word was never uttered in polite circles in my day. When referring to the gluteal region, “buttocks” or “behind” were the words generally chosen. The four-footed jackass, Equus asinus, was invariably called a “donkey,” but Matthew’s wording of Jesus entering Jerusalem “riding on an ass” was accepted, since it came out of Holy Writ.
The c-word, by the way, is “crap,” a synonym for the s-word. I recall when Laura Ingraham (Laura Ingraham Show on radio) cut a caller off because of his repeated use of the c-word. She was irate.
Several years ago, Rush Limbaugh exchanged “You’re a bastard!” outbursts with a hate-Rush caller who wasted no time launching into an angry tirade against the radio talk show host.
Limbaugh, who used to drop a “hell” here and there, now does so more frequently; and the anger in his voice is plainly evident.
Then there’s the p-word, “pissed off.” Ugh! Since when does urinary flow reflect one’s emotional state? The baby boomers, who gave us this vulgarism, never got over their infantile/childish fascination for body fluids (and body orifices).
It is the stored-up anger behind the use of off-color words that we should be paying attention to. In psychiatry, we have a term that is a propos: lalochezia, emotional relief stemming from the use of indecent language.
We, the elders of America, weren’t Little Lord (and Lady) Fauntleroys in our youth. We acquired the same street vocabulary that all generations do, except we learned to curb our tongue. We were taught to do so.
The widespread use of foul language is one symptom of an unhealthy society. The Founding Fathers who fashioned our Constitution were aware that the document they were creating would only work for a virtuous people.
PostScript: The dictionary defines virtue as “moral excellence and righteousness.” To quote Edmund Burke (18th cent.): ” But what is liberty without… virtue? It [becomes] the greatest of all possible evils….”