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The lesson is to write and swear carefully
We are shocked when someone who uses profanity in public makes the news, especially if that person is running for elected office. But like it or not, profanity is as American as apple pie.
As I wrote over a hundred years ago in my book “A Few Words About Words,” HL Mencken said that the average American swears about ten times as much as someone from the United Kingdom or other countries. I remember working for the DuPont Company and interacting with professionals in other countries. It was shocking (and a little embarrassing) to realize that someone for whom English was their second language felt the need to swear in almost every sentence; a DuPont colleague from Germany started every sentence with the F-word. It was his way of connecting with his American counterparts.
The way we talk about someone’s use of profanity also becomes a bit of a clusterf*&k. Nearly sixty years ago, New York Times reporter J. Anthony Lukas covered the trial of the Chicago Seven, individuals accused of disrupting the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. On the first day of the trial, the seven defendants spent the day shouting “Bulls__t” and said little else. By the time the day’s work was over, Lukas realized that the entire day was dedicated to a word that his newspaper and employer did not want to print. He got around this problem by coining the term “barnyard name.” That term eventually became the title of Luke’s book on the trial and remains the Times’s accepted method of referring to the more vulgar version of the word to this day.
When I wrote “A Few Words About Words,” I quoted someone from Liverpool, England, who dropped an F-bomb. I wanted to spell the F-word in such a way that someone reading the story would understand that the speaker was using a Cockney accent. So I wrote to a colleague living in Liverpool, offering four spellings of the F-word and asking which was closest to Cockney. She wrote back with a fifth spelling, telling me that my first version was too Scottish, the second too British, and the last two were “exactly what Americans think we sound like.” This proved two things to me. First of all, everyone takes their swear words seriously, and second, if you’re going to swear, do it right.
The news recently looked at one candidate’s use of profanity, but all the presidents have been caught uttering words that required them to drop a dollar in the swear jar. When he was vice president, Joe Biden called the passage of the Affordable Care Act “a big deal.” When he heard how much Air Force One would cost, President John F. Kennedy said, “There must have been a mistake somewhere.” And President Harry S. Truman called General Douglas MacArthur a “stupid son of a b—.”
But fear not, because we are not falling into a bottomless pit of swear words. Nearly a decade ago, while working at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education, I started a program where students would manage the school’s Instagram page one day a week. It was a way for students to show potential program applicants what school life is like. While preparing volunteers, a student asked me if they could use profanity in their messages.
I took a deep breath and said I wasn’t going to be the language police. I quickly added that because they were all students, I was confident they could express strong opinions without swearing. As far as I know, Vanderbilt Peabody still regularly lets students manage the school’s Instagram page. And no one swears.
A reader of my book put it succinctly when it comes to blasphemy. He said, ‘Words aren’t scary. People who use words are.”
Let us write there carefully – and swear.
Lee County resident Joe Diorio is the author of “A Few Words About Words” and the forthcoming “Crisis Communications and the Art of Making Nothing Happen.”