The Endangered ‘Bleep’
Like Ralphie in the 1983 classic, A Christmas Story, I’m acquainted with the taste of bar soap. Granted, his was red Lifebuoy and mine green Palmolive, but close enough. I can’t remember what prompted my mom to administer this particular punishment, but I picked up a hint from my kindergarten teacher’s written evaluation, which I discovered years later. It was mostly positive, but she observed that I had “a weakness for toilet talk.” Maybe it was something along the lines of “poo poo.”
Those were the days — the mid-‘50s — when you didn’t mess around with naughty (profane, scatological, obscene, blasphemous) talk, at least in our neck of the woods. My dad was both a preacher and a prof of Southern Baptist persuasion in Southwest Arkansas. By my parents’ lights, you didn’t even flirt with transgression, whether venturing ‘Heck’ for ‘Hell,’ ‘Darn’ or ‘Dang’ for ‘Damn,’ or maybe even ‘Shoot’ for… well, you know. Yes, they had an “expletive” or two at their disposal: Mom occasionally said, “Nertz.” Maybe it was a cognate of General McAuliffe’s response (“Nuts!”) to the German commander whose forces had surrounded the G.I.’s at Bastogne. As for dad, he might slip with exasperation into an old East Tennessee expression, “I vow and declare…” Or, more likely with a smile, he’d utter, “Dunfermline!”, the Scottish town which lay across “the Firth of Forth in Fife” from Edinburgh, where he did his doctoral work.
Then came the 1960s. Even the clean-cut Kingston Trio proclaimed they didn’t “give a damn about a greenback a-dollar.” To be fair, folks like Cole Porter had been crossing boundaries of propriety back in the twenties and thirties, as with “Let’s Do It” and “Anything Goes.” And I remember concern over the Everly Brothers’ 1958 song, “Wake Up Little Susie.” But, as a rule, individual words were more suggestive than blatant, more in the realm of double-entendres.
In 1966, Lenny Bruce was arrested for saying nine nasty words from the stage; in 1972, George Carlin listed seven you couldn’t say on TV. When the FCC sided with the objectors, the dispute ended up in the Supreme Court, which narrowly backed the FCC’s right to tighten things up. Those were the days.
What could once get you cancelled as a lowlife is now a pathway to celebrity.
Fast forward to Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice,” honored by a Grammy nomination in 1995. The “artist” has since gone on to headline a Super Bowl halftime show and to do ads with the cultured Martha Stewart for Tostitos, T-Mobile, Bic grill lighters, and Sketchers. She even got a Snoop tattoo in this last one. Of course, movies, cable TV, and the Internet have all played their part in making the formerly unthinkable normative. As a result, we’ve seen an inversion. What could once get you cancelled as a lowlife is now a pathway to celebrity.
To boot (pun intended), we boomers who came of age during the Vietnam draft period were marinated in what Tom Wolfe called “Army Creole” (cf. “swear like a sailor”). The proliferation of coarse language in the ranks goes back centuries, and those of us who served had much of it imprinted on our hard drives.
It’s little wonder that such talk has jumped to the civilian sector, even to the hallowed walls of Congress. As Politico reports, trashy talk is emerging as the native tongue among Democrats, with Jasmine Crockett as the “shining” example. Predictably, anthropological facilitators are emerging.
A 2021 article in the Wall Street Journal ventured some friendly guesses on the popularity of such discourse. Noting the dramatic frequency of three nasty expressions on Twitter and Facebook, 2019-2021, the writer tied it to several developments — to COVID, whose Zoom culture helped break down workplace formalities; to the way in which swearing has a pain-relieving effect; to our desire to signal intimacy in a time of isolation; to its role as a relaxant, making cursing “the yoga pants and Uggs of language”; to its demonstration of “a kind of grittiness, or an appealing edge.” Besides, “It’s how people genuinely talk to each other.” (RELATED: Foul, Potty-Mouthed, Woke Women)
Well. As the SNL “church lady” would put it, “Isn’t that special?”
To be fair, thanks to the obscuring sands of time, once-charged expressions have lost their transgressive punch. Little did we Batman watchers in the ‘60s suspect that “Gadzooks!” and “Zounds!” appearing in the show’s “fight balloons” cheapened reference to the Crucifixion of Christ. And few today are triggered by such declarations as “We’ve got a lot of crap to sort through in the attic” and “I really screwed up when I tried to fix my car’s transmission.”
Sometimes, you’re totally unaware of the meaning of what you’ve said. My high school French book presented “Zut, alors!” as a way of saying, “Wowzer!” But a European, Christian colleague of mine suggested it was otherwise freighted. And then there was the college friend who invited me to think through the provenance of “brown nose.”
All said, the drift of the Overton Window has pretty much hit its limit, the way it did with “gender affirming” surgery for minors. Though the entrepreneurs of fresh squalidity won’t give up trying, it’s hard to see where else they might venture without overwhelming backlash.
Granted, rough talk has its place, even in the Bible, as when the Apostle Paul, in Galatians 5:12, prescribed emasculation for the folks tying eternal salvation to circumcision. And yes, a cop facing an oncoming armed felon can be excused for shouting, “Drop the **** gun,” turning it up to 11, as it were. Still, the officer’s obscene wording is neither necessary nor sufficient; “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” should do nicely.
Beginning with a grade school Sunday School teacher in the 1950s and suggested now and then to this day, I’ve heard it said that those disposed toward swearing have a “limited vocabulary”; they use these words as filler when their meager supply of contempt-laden expressions lets them down. You might say they’ve defaulted into Obnoxious Esperanto. But I have my doubts. If you offered ‘feculent’ as a replacement for “full of [it],” he’d probably say, “Thanks, but no.” He’d prefer the radioactive version.
The issue has hit me afresh in this past holiday season. On drive-time radio, I heard a promo for a new sports talk show brag on its free use of the F-word. A few days later, I came upon teenage grandkids, in for Christmas, who were watching videos of police encounters with nefarious characters. As expected, those apprehended spewed obscenities, but I was surprised to see the bleeped words spelled out on the screen, albeit with “fig leaf” asterisks. Heretofore, on “PD-Cam” shows, I’d simply heard bleeps, but now we were getting subscripted help in sorting out the crud. I think we’re moving toward the “Why bother?” stage when it comes to sound masking.
On New Year’s Day, we watched Mississippi upset Georgia in the Sugar Bowl and were pleased to hear the winning quarterback thank Jesus first off for his help. Unfortunately, his good-ole-boy coach prompted bleeps over his subsequent locker-room comments. I’m wondering if we’re moving toward bleeping out the QB’s “sectarian” and “divisive” remarks, while withholding them from locker room vulgarities. I’m confident the ACLU would sign off on that.
Still, I think there are a few encouraging signs that society is reaching its elegant sufficiency.
A few days after our kids and their kids left for their hometowns, one of our shower fixtures faltered. As I rummaged around for a misplaced Allen wrench, my wife ran to the plumber with a phone shot of the troublesome site. As she stood in line, a customer casually dropped the “F-bomb” in conversation, and the clerk called him out on it, telling him that didn’t go in his shop, particularly with a lady present. Perhaps the offender wasn’t even aware of what he’d said, accustomed and inured to its employment. But there are still folks who’ll rebuke you for it.
And I’ll note a surprise Christmas gift that appeared in my mailbox. A couple of months ago, I was talking to some guys at a coffee shop about my fine experience at “Nateland,” and this fellow bought me a ball cap with that lettering. Thanks to Vet Tix for veterans, I’d caught a two-hour cluster of clean acts at a Nashville comedy club. From time to time, they’d set aside a room featuring comics who don’t work “blue,” and I jumped at the chance to hear them. It’s named for Nate Bargatze, who’s delighting — and astonishing — folks on Netflix and SNL with his clean routines. Who knew you could be funny without being vile?
Yes, there are many ways to describe and explain dirty talk, and I’ll suggest another metaphorical angle: It’s like serving up a sulfurous belch in public, a pleasure for the performer, an affliction for the audience, at least for those whose wholesome sensitivities are not yet seared.
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