At random 6/15

Sunday, June 15, 2003

When I was about 10 years old, my mother got a phone call from a neighboring mother whose young son Bunny was a friend of mine. "Charles's language is appalling," Mrs. Wilson lamented; "Bunny is coming home with words that neither I nor his father ever use in this house. You need to talk to him about this." And Mom did, at that. As I remember it, my mother was the one who gave me the dressing-down, since it was probably from my father that I learned the offending words in the first place. It was from that little lecture that I learned to keep "dirty words" under my hat "in polite society." Note I did not unlearn any of them; I just learned not to use them among young children and those adults who also refrained from using them. Kind of hypocritical, no? I might once have experienced the thrill of using the forbidden words, but that thrill, alas, has long since disappeared as I grew to know just about all the naughty words there are (in English). I'm seldom surprised any more. And I don't myself use forbidden language in normal discourse, but usually only when I grow angry or frustrated. I think it's a sign of my growing age that I'm getting impatient with the expanding use of foul language in the public media. I can remember (oh, here he goes again!) the year when, Elvis Presley appearing on the admittedly family-oriented Ed Sullivan Show, the cameramen were not allowed to show Elvis from the hips down. Who made that decision? Was there, back in the 1950's, a written guidebook of what was proper, or a censor who made those decisions? Did Ed Sullivan himself make those decisions? Not so long ago, I tuned in to the TV show "Friends," about a handful of thirty-somethings who live together in an apartment, getting started in their careers. I think it's a funny show, well-written and well-acted. I think it just completed its ninth season. But the jokes and language used regularly would have shocked Mrs. Wilson. And the language is all gratuitous. Nothing in the plot is riding on it. It must just be a device to show the target audience -- of teenage students and retired English teachers -- that we all speak on the same level of formality. Even that bastion of propriety and good taste, The New Yorker Magazine, has fallen. In that case, the Editor-in-Chief is the one who decides what is allowed and what is forbidden in the magazine. While its founder Harold Ross was in charge, there was not a single word that would offend Mrs. Wilson. Now there are plenty. And I find myself, unwittingly, thinking it cheapens the magazine. In the heyday of that periodical, when it featured fiction and non-fiction by James Thurber, Irwin Shaw, E.B. White, John Hersey, and many other greats and semi-greats, there was nary a "dirty word" in any of them. Would they have liked the opportunity to use such language? Perhaps. Would their works have been better for the occasional use of a damn or hell? Perhaps. But I doubt it. Yet it's good to remember that the language that was once shocking and unacceptable is perfectly fine today, and what's considered foul today is likely to be acceptable tomorrow. The language that Mark Twain put in the mouth of Huck Finn in the American masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, shocked a lot of readers when it was first published in 1885. In fact, the Concord, Massachusetts, public library -- just a stone's-throw from Ralph Waldo Emerson's house -- took the book off its shelf because, as the head librarian said, the book is "the veriest trash," referring to Huck's ungrammatical language -- language that today's English teachers praise for its freshness, imaginativeness, and vigor. If, however, it's true that language evolves and yesterday's taboo words are perfectly acceptable, even fashionable today, what, pray tell, will tomorrow's dirty words be? Mrs. Wilson and I are waiting. (Dr. Nash had a #$$%^^&&*) time writing this.)

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