Thursday, March 13, 2008
A river of profanity
Linda Whitlock
Recent columns
From the RoundTable blog
I wouldn't swear to it (no pun intended), but I'm almost certain the first cuss word I ever heard on TV was on good old "Bonanza" back in the '60s. By current standards, it was a mild four-letter expletive, one few people today would even notice.
I'm sure it wasn't the first profanity uttered on television, but it was new to me. Who knew those first few daring words trickling into primetime TV would become one more stream feeding the sewer of rotten language that now floods nearly every area of our culture?
Profanity likely is as old as language itself. But, during my lifetime at least, there was a time when it knew its place -- the locker room, the military, dockyards and construction sites -- anywhere mainly the province of men. Now men have few places they can call their own and profanity's place seems to be in our faces.
The sexual revolution, the feminist movement, the relaxing of broadcast, movie and music standards -- all have played their part in the torrent of profanity that flows, these days, not just from the mouths of adults, but kids, too.
Once women began behaving sexually just like men and moving into jobs once the domain of men, men had no reason to watch their language around women. And women had no reason not to pick up the speech habits of men.
Movie and television producers started adding a little more cussing here, a scatological reference or two there. In time, most of the old standards crumbled. Now, except for the occasional G-rated one, it's hard to find a movie that doesn't resort to profanity and potty humor to some degree. Even, and sometimes especially, those targeted to kids.
Kids have learned their lessons well. According to McClatchy-Tribune reporter Melanie Glover ("From the mouths of teenagers flow bluer streaks than ever," Feb. 25), experts agree "[a]dolescents and preteens are swearing more publicly than ever -- especially at school." Swearing is so much a part of their vocabulary, it's "become casual to them," as 13-year-old Kaley McGrew puts it.
If it's worse now than it used to be, it must be pretty bad. I can remember my daughter complaining 20 years ago about the language many of her classmates at a local high school were using.
Now, though, it's not just the high school kids. Even elementary kids are getting into the act. "Elementary schoolteachers report ... children are using more offensive language at school than they have in the past," notes Timothy Jay, an expert on U.S. cursing trends Glover quotes in her article.
Jay acknowledges the role all types of media play in profanity's proliferation among kids, but he casts most of the blame on the language their parents use. Those parents, of course, would include my daughter's teenage classmates -- early beneficiaries of the media's crumbling standards. Garbage in, garbage out, as the computer folks say.
But a week or so after reading that depressing analysis, I heard that South Pasadena, Calif., had been declared a no-cussing zone -- for the first week of March anyway. And who was it who got a California city to proclaim an annual no-cussing week? Fourteen-year-old McKay Hatch.
In John Rogers' March 6 Associated Press article, "Curses foiled this week in South Pasadena," Hatch admits to having cussed some, himself. But he quit. Then he told his friends and challenged them to quit, too. Enough did so that in 2007, Hatch launched the No Cussing Club. Since then, according to the club's Web site (www.nocussing.com), the club has attracted 10,000 members worldwide.
"Through the No Cussing Challenge," Hatch says on the Web site, "I realized that I could use positive peer pressure on my friends. If my friends could say no to cussing, how much easier will it be for them to say no to drugs, violence and pornography." Perceptive kid.
Hatch considers the South Pasadena cussing ban his greatest accomplishment, says Rogers, and he hopes other cities will follow suit. Me, too. Meanwhile, whatever your age, you can clean up your own act. As Mr. Navarro, the club's oldest member at 103, says, "You're never too old to change."
Whitlock, a Roanoke Times columnist, is an adjunct English professor who lives in Salem.
