Profanity and Me

First things first. I was put in mind of this topic because I suddenly recalled an intensifier and an initialism  from college days, a half-century ago. My group at the newspaper decided that some assholes needed a more vivid description; we settled on “bloated and inflamed asshole,” also referred to by its initialism, BAIA. I am sure you are aware of the BAIAs in the news that brought the term to mind.

If you are more interested in my ideas than me, you can stop here.

Second, the length of this item is not a proxy for importance, but rather a proxy for my interest.

For the first 18 years of my life, profanity was simply a non-event, so rare that it amazed me if it escaped my lips. I went to public school, so I had heard it all from my peers. But when it came to swearing, my parents were teetotalers. That seems remarkable in retrospect, since I was born when they were only 16 and 18, with my brother Steve following 18 months later. That, alone, would probably induce profanity in most people.

My parents were not particularly religious; their attitude stemmed from their own profanity-free upbringing, and their firmly held and frequently repeated opinion that “profanity is the last refuge of the small mind.” It is a fact that my mother never used the F-word until she was 40, although she became enamored of it after that.

I worked in public radio in high school, which helped restrain me, as, in the late 1960s, the swiftest way to be thrown off the air was to swear on the air.

But when I got to MIT, I found my people: the staff of the student newspaper, The Tech. To say that we swore enough to make a sailor blush is not fair to sailors; any self-respecting mariner would have gotten up and walked out of the room upon hearing us. Our use of the F-word in all parts of speech rivalled that of the most profanity-prone soldiers in World War II.

However, like my drinking, my profanity peaked in my senior year and tapered off to almost nothing shortly after graduation. I believe I set a reasonably good example for my daughters.

Comments

[Robert E. Malchman]

I swore conventionally in high school (though not in front of my parents), but really developed a creative and expansive repetoire at The Tech. The problem with most swear words is that repetition dulls their effect. "M*****f*****" used to be a fighting word once upon a time. Now it's white noise or water off a duck's back meaning simply, "I'm angry at you." What you want is a profane, obscene and/or vulgar insult that really gets the target's attention. My two favorites are "assjuice" and "dickcheese." You address someone as "assjuice," it really brings them up short.

[Clark Smith]

I am often dismayed that contemporary English commentators are unaware of the distinctions of swearing. Your column observes no better. Swearing is divided into edits in three realms: vulgarity (bodily functions, e.g. "shit" in its many uses), obesity (sexual, e.g. "fuck" in its many uses) and profanity (religious heresies, blasphemies and other prohibitions, including "God damn" damn, goddamned etc.).
In many sects, substituted words are no less indicted: dash-darned, golly, gosh, GOT and folly-down-doo-dah-dad are equally indictable, as if the Ten Commandments included exclusions for the pure in heart.

My second wife was saved from a strict evangelical training in which all such language was verboten. Once in the midst of a heated argument, I asked her, if she was thinking them, to at least have the common decency to speak the words.

She never did so again. She said what she meant and never learned upon scriptural sanction to free speech. I loved the sailor lingua franca she mastered and we both laughed about.

What if any role can these terms now substitute foe such sophomoric writing as ALL CAPS?

My answer - good writing that is compelling. State your point provocatively, dispassionately, succinctly and poetically. Swearing will mostly just get in your way.