My mother once told me that when I was a very young child, I was asked if I had my Easter speech ready to recite during the holiday church program.
"Speech?" she said I quipped. "I don't know nothing about no d*** speech."
I have no memory of the incident, which I was apparently young enough to get away with at the time. As I got older, any utterance of a curse word -- or "cuss word" as they were pronounced in the family -- would be swiftly, painfully dealt with. This despite the fact that my churchgoing mother could be mildly profane on occasion; more forcefully profane if she were upset enough.
I guess that's why my moral attitude toward curse words has long been at odds with my comportment when it comes to using them.
Lately said moral attitude has been exerting itself when I read things, especially online features and lifestyle articles put forth by nontraditional publications. The scenario: I'm reading some very informative, articulate piece, possibly "Amen"-ing the thing and bam! The writer lands an F-bomb. Inevitably, another bomb drops, then another, sometimes the same word, sometimes another expletive.
This seems to be more rule than exception in 21st-century media outlets in general, online ones in particular: use of various creative incarnations of the ubiquitous F-bomb along with other expressions that, back in the so-called good ol' days, got youthful mouths washed out with soap.
Or ... not. I remember a childhood phone conversation during which I was shocked to hear a friend and classmate, Linda, dropping cuss words while her mother was within earshot. I just knew she was dead meat. But then her mother got on the phone and nicely explained the permissive attitude in their household concerning language.
Now, some four and a half decades later, the spirit of Linda's parents seems to have taken hold. In a March Huffington Post weblog article, "At Our House, Swearing Is Not a Big [bleeping] Deal," Wendy Fontaine writes of how she and her husband allow their 9-year-old daughter to cuss at home. "All around her, there will be swear words and salty language," Fontaine wrote. "Teaching her what these words mean and how to put them into context helps her make sense of her surroundings." Fellow Huffington Post blog writer Casey Erin Wood agrees via her post, "In Defense of the F-Word: The Case for Conscious Cussing." Wood thinks that "we should [eschew] the idea that some words are bad and therefore shouldn't be used." Oh, and there's a much-ballyhooed study in the November issue of Language Science showing that, contrary to long-held beliefs, cussing is actually done by people who are more intelligent and have a bigger vocabulary than those who don't. This aids and abets the notion that cussing is just a harmless way of letting off steam.
These attitudes bother me. But, sigh, I'm also the one who has watched TV shows whose audio was so bleep-heavy with censored words, they may as well not have run the audio at all; viewed feature films that would have made some nice money had I had $10 for every time the F-bomb was dropped; and prayed incessantly for forgiveness -- and deliverance -- for profanity use, as there's a slew of Good Book scriptures discouraging the practice.
But just as some advocate salty language use, others still discourage it.
"As someone who writes for a living," wrote Carmi Levy in a 2014 article "The Case Against Profanity" in Voiceovertimes.com, "I've always viewed profanity as a bit of a crutch, something to be tossed into a conversation when you deliberately want something to explode. But the problem is, once you've lobbed the profanity grenade, there's no going back. If you've spent days, weeks, months or even years trying to build credibility or trust, one well-placed word can, in a blink of an eye, undo all that effort ... At some point, we lose a bit of ourselves if we allow language to devolve into an endless stream of profanity."
Thriller author Mark Henshaw posted an article on his website explaining why there are no cuss words in his books: No. 1. "I wasn't raised to talk that way, so I don't write that way." No. 5: "I want to live in a more polite society."
So I'm not alone in my botheration. That botheration seems to be occurring with more frequency, which might be a sign that my asked-for deliverance is on its way. And, along with it, credibility when making the point that whereas the right to freedom of speech doesn't end where the other person's eyes or ears begin, it could stand some self-editing.
No fussin', no cussin', just email:
hwilliams@arkansasonline.com
Style on 08/21/2016