‘Profanity, like any other art,” wrote H. L. Mencken, “has had its ups and downs—its golden ages of proliferation and efflorescence and its dark ages of decay and desuetude.” Mencken wrote that in 1945, in Supplement One to his The American Language. Whether he thought that time, just at the close of World War II, was a high or low period, he does not say. My own sense is that we are just now in a dark and dreary period for profanity, which is a shame, for lively profanity can be a delight to both its users and its audience.
That profanity can be an art there is no doubt. I once worked with a man named Bob Larman who, when honked at in traffic, would quickly roll down his window and respond, “Blow it out your duffel bag, farthead!” I went to high school with a boy who introduced me to “Schmuckowitz,” a wonderful term of contempt. Nor shall I ever forget Andrew Atherton, my sergeant in basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, master of the art of high-low comic swearing. Upon announcing the availability of religious services, he closed by saying, “As for those of you of the Hebrew persuasion, it behooves you to get your sorry asses to Friday evening services.”
I have a distinct recollection of my own initiation into profanity. It was, precisely, at 8-and-a-half years old, when I went off to Interlaken summer camp in Eagle River, Wisconsin. Before that summer I remember using such words and phrases as “jeez,” “goldarn,” “cry Pete,” and “holy cow.” The older boys at Camp Interlaken, widening my vocabulary in this realm, taught me more vivid language was possible.
My father never swore in mixed company, and when he did swear he never used the F-word. Nor did he ever avail himself of below-the-belt words, those many dysphemisms for the male and female genitals. He might refer to another man as “an s.o.b.”; or, when aroused to true anger, “a real bastard.” But that was it. I never heard my mother, a true lady though no prude, swear at all.
Today, of course, men and women swear freely, in or out of mixed company. A contemporary movie without what is designated “adult language” is rarer than Provençal French in a National Football League locker-room. In postgame interviews, athletes will occasionally speak of having “kicked ass” or describe coaches or managers as “pissed off” without being bleeped. Less than a century ago the press and radio and later network television stations were not allowed such words as “prostitute” and “bordello,” let alone “hooker” and “cathouse.” In 1945, Mencken noted that the general tendency was “toward ever plainer speech [in what was not yet then known as the media], and many words that were under the ban only a few years ago are now used freely.” Now, with cable television having swung the gates wide open to profanity, the only dirty word left is “censorship” itself.
Notable holdouts for a while there were. Under the editorship of William Shawn, no profane words were allowed in the New Yorker, and the description of the sex act in his pages was beyond unthinkable. If one came across a short story by those two regular New Yorker contributors John Cheever or John Updike in any other magazine, one could be sure that it included an elaborately described bonk or two.
At various times in my own life I have been more profane than others. In high school I swore no less than my friends, which was a fair amount. In the army it was no more possible to refrain from swearing than to refrain from smoking. I recall once, about to enter the mess hall at headquarters company, Fort Hood, Texas, asking a fellow trooper coming out what was for dinner and his casually replying, “Some red shit.”
While profanity is ubiquitous today, it has also lost much of its ability to shock, though Samantha Bee’s recently applying that still most sulphurous of words to Ivanka Trump did get the nation’s attention. But the great F-word, through overuse, has become a bit of a bore, and the too-frequent, or overly dramatic, use of it shows a want of originality. (Robert De Niro, take a bow.) I try to restrict my own use of it to the exclamatory, when, say, breaking a dish or stubbing a toe, when my self-editing facility is nil.
Now an older gentleman, white hairs far outnumbering brown, I feel it unseemly to swear more than is absolutely necessary. The loss of the useful word referring to bull droppings when listening to politicians has been a genuine subtraction. Formulating insults about them in cleaner language, though, I find gives more pleasure than the easy resort to vulgar epithets. Is there life without profanity? Gosh, gee whiz, doggone, I hope so.
