Is there anyone out there now who doesn’t swear? Is there anyone who doesn’t revel in vulgar language?
You hear it everywhere and from almost everyone. When I was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, swearing was the undisputed territory of guys. Guys who worked with their hands — construction men, plumbers and carpenters — cursed copiously on the job. Sailors cursed all the time, or so we were told. Sometimes a neighborhood dad would let loose a stream of bad words from the backyard when he was three beers in, but not often.
Among cursing guys, there were rules. Swearing was an outdoor activity. Keep it out of the house. Never swear in front of women. Never curse out a teacher or a cop. I heard my father swear all of once in my life: He said that he and his buddies at the restaurant would be “working like hell.” That was it: one “hell” in the 15 sentient years I lived beside him.
Now we live in a cacophony of curses. People curse on the job, no matter how white their collars. Kids now swear as well as the mythical swearing sailors of my youth. Have I heard a person of the cloth swear? Who hasn’t?
To some, this, no doubt, feels like liberation. The right to cuss things out, call things as you see them and dress people down is now democratized. The patriarchal right to vulgarity has been opened up to everyone! Viva la liberation!
I don’t mean to be prudish about this. There are times and places for some A-1 vulgarity. One of my more satisfying moments was telling the tyrannical boss of a road gang I worked on one summer to go void himself in his hat, though in slightly different words.
But obscenity loses its power and meaning in ubiquity. These days, curse words fill the air like angry drones — an ambient buzzing of bitter, nasty words.
Does vulgarity even matter anymore? Should I just get on with my __________ (fill in the blank with your go-to) life?
Maybe. But I fear the situation is slightly more serious. Compulsive vulgarity — talking dreck all the time — gives evidence of a troubled view of life and spreads it. Nasty language is a black-magic wand. When you touch it to a person, place or thing, you perform an act of mild (and sometimes not so mild) denigration. When you use everyone’s favorite vulgar word to denote the sexual act, you reduce the act. You gut the spirit life out of it. With profanity, you denigrate what you feel is overvalued. You try to cut it down to size. Granted, some things do need to be cut down. Some people could use a dose of vulgar chastening.
But not everyone and not everything and (most important) not all the time. A sprinkle of salt gives your dinner savor; a handful kills it. When you curse compulsively you produce a view of the world that’s smaller and meaner. It’s the view that Wallace Stevens satirizes in his fictional Mrs. Alfred Uruguay, who claims she “wiped away moonlight like mud.” Stevens goes at it again in “Gubbinal”:
That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.
The poet sees the sun as a miraculous phenomenon, provoking metaphors to describe it — the strange flower, that tuft of jungle feathers, that animal eye. But his interlocutor clearly insists on dead, dull renderings, affirming, directly or not, that “the world is ugly, and the people are sad.” Maybe he uses some reductive profanity to make his point. He’s a “gubbin,” an unimaginative being, and his dull song that the poet is listening to is a “gubbinal.”
Compulsive vulgarity can be an exercise in the reductive fallacy. That’s the view that the worst you can say about anyone, or anything, is the most significantly true. Have we all become proponents of cruel reduction? When the reductionist wants to get to know someone quickly, he asks, What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?
Not long ago I saw what passed for a comedy skit by Jon Stewart, a protest aimed at businesses and law firms that capitulated too quickly to the demands of the most publicly profane of presidents. Mr. Stewart writhed and leaped like a demon, frantically repeating his wish that those who acquiesced to President Trump initiate carnal relations with themselves. Behind him was a gospel choir singing and swaying in time to his song and dance.
The target was ultimately Mr. Trump’s toadies, sure. But a piece of collateral damage was the choir members and their spiritual artistry, enlisted into the vulgar diatribe. They were co-opted to make a point and got dipped briefly in the mud.
That mud is everywhere now.
Omnipresent cursing, the programmatic reduction of nearly everything, pollutes our worldview. It makes it harder to see what is true and good and beautiful. We become blind to instances of courage and compassion. Our world shrinks. And we shrink along with it.
On the other hand, the willingness to use decent words suggests a decent heart and mind. And decency can breed decency. My nonswearing father had his faults (though no more than I do), but he was hard-working, considerate and kind. He was the guy who hustled over to shovel the steps for the elderly lady next door after a Boston blizzard; the guy who’d hop out of bed after midnight to help a friend whose car had broken down; who was always ready to fill in for another guy at the restaurant where he worked. Is it a coincidence — maybe it is — that my noncursing father was also one of the very few white men I knew well growing up whom I never heard say anything racist? He was a decent guy, in deed, but also in his words. Maybe we all should be.
Mark Edmundson is a professor at the University of Virginia.
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