There was a time when the sight of a woman's bare ankle or someone shouting "By God!" could send some to the fainting couch. But social mores and cuss words, just like language itself, evolve, and what once was offensive isn't so much so anymore.
Well, to most people.
This comes up after the uproar over a Burger King commercial's incidental use of the word "damn," which doesn't bother most of us here in the newsroom, especially as we've heard much worse (and how). As my colleagues on the editorial page put it last Thursday in talking about the kerfuffle: "Have you seen what passes for video games today? Or movies? If some dude choking down a burger murmurs the word 'damn,' we doubt the damage. Kids are hearing worse than that walking to second-grade lunch."
Or in their own houses.
University of Utah linguistics professor Randall Eggert wrote a column in The Washington Post in 2015 that just as well could refer to today, noting, "this consternation over mores is misguided. Yes, the four-letter words we once considered the worst of the worst have become more acceptable. But as we've relaxed our most puritanical attitudes toward sex and faith--and the taboo terms that stem from them--other prohibited words have risen to replace them."
Eggert told HowStuffWorks that what's considered more offensive now are racial and other slurs, while before the early 19th century it would be profanity (religious-based swears, which would include "damn"), and in the Victorian era, obscenity or sexual swears.
No matter what is said, someone will be offended by it. There are words that won't appear in this paper, not necessarily because they're cuss words, but because they don't pass the breakfast test--words that might inspire nausea over your morning cornflakes. More serious expletives (generally obscenity) get the asterisk or "-word" treatment. But even words like "darn" and "geez" have upset readers.
Society has coarsened a bit over the years, but people today might be shocked at some of the words in wide use in earlier days that we now find offensive, and which I don't use here or on my blog.
Yet as Harvard cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker notes, swearing is a fact of life. "When used judiciously," Pinker wrote in 2007 in The New Republic, "swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration, meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our attitudes, both thinkable and unthinkable. It engages the full expanse of the brain: left and right, high and low, ancient and modern."
Which brings me to the editorial Thursday: "Words are powerful things. Like guns, some should never be taken out of the cabinet. But when you're walking down a path in a beautiful Arkansas forest, and a bear or wild boar appears out of nowhere, what are you gonna scream? Fiddlesticks? Who's going to come to the aid of fiddlesticks?"
Not many, as most people wouldn't recognize "fiddlesticks" as denoting a serious situation ... unless a souffle falling is your equivalent of danger. Sure, if the boss is coming to dinner and he loves souffle ...
Science tells us that cussing can actually be good for us by relieving stress and reducing pain. I know when I badly sliced a finger several months ago, I didn't respond with "fiddlesticks." It wouldn't have made me feel better or stemmed the flow of blood.
Pinker wrote of the "bizarre number of different ways in which we swear. There is cathartic swearing, as when we slice our thumb along with the bagel. There are imprecations, as when we offer advice to someone who has cut us off in traffic. There are vulgar terms for everyday things and activities, as when Bess Truman was asked to get the president to say fertilizer instead of manure and she replied, 'You have no idea how long it took me to get him to say manure.' There are figures of speech that put obscene words to other uses, such as the barnyard epithet for insincerity, the army acronym snafu, and the gynecological-flagellative term for uxorial dominance. And then there are the adjective-like expletives that salt the speech and split the words of soldiers, teenagers, and Irish rock-stars."
While I don't think use of the f-word is merited in most music, I can't deny that Ariana Grande has a magnificent voice. If I couldn't bear hearing even the cleaned-up radio versions of her songs, I simply wouldn't listen. Just as no one in the U.S. should force someone to follow a specific religion, no one is forcing me to lend Ariana an ear.
That's what people seem to forget. We have a choice as to how we spend our time and money. We don't have to give cuss words power with our offense.
If you want to give something power, let it be something positive. Maybe chocolate ... or something with fur ...
------------v------------
Assistant Editor Brenda Looper is editor of the Voices page. Read her blog at blooper0223.wordpress.com. Email her at [email protected].
Editorial on 01/22/2020