Kicking Home a Presidential Point : Language: George Bush calls things as he sees them, and one of his favorite expressions has become part of the linguistic legacy of the Persian Gulf War.

Richard Nixon (who once accused the press of kicking him around) raised a few eyebrows in the ‘70s when Watergate tapes revealed him asking White House counsel John W. Dean III, “Have you kicked a few butts around?”

This little phrase, sandwiched between deleted expletives and a big dollop of damns and hells, seemed just a bit, well, less than presidential.

True, profanity and vulgarity were no strangers to some earlier residents at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Harry Truman, never one to mince words, was given to calling people he disliked--among them Gen. Douglas MacArthur--sons of bitches.

Still, a certain amount of propriety has always been assigned to the office and those who hold it.

Nevertheless, a by-now-famous George Bush-ism--”kicking ass”--appears to be one of the linguistic legacies of the Persian Gulf War.

The nation hardly managed a collective blink last December when the media, reporting a meeting between President Bush and members of Congress, quoted the President as saying that, if there was a war, Saddam Hussein was “going to get his ass kicked.”

The President delivered and, just last Friday, expressing his satisfaction with the quick cease-fire, Bush noted that Hussein had indeed gotten properly “kicked.”

In between those two pronouncements, as war raged in the Gulf, military and civilian leaders and “Top Gun” pilots went around talking about “kicking ass” in the Middle East. At home front rallies in support of U.S. troops, “Kick Butt” placards sprouted alongside those proclaiming “God Bless America.” On city streets, “Kick Ass” T-shirts were spotted. Radio, television and newspapers embraced variations on the theme, quoting Bush, field commanders, field soldiers and grandmothers.

One New York reader wrote to People magazine, “How can our President wish for a kinder and gentler society in one breath and talk of ‘kicking ass’ in another?”

Only six years earlier, the same George Bush had kicked up a mini-storm after his television debate with Democratic vice presidential hopeful Geraldine Ferraro. He told an official of the International Longshoremen’s Assn. that he had “tried to kick a little ass.”

The remark was picked up by a TV crew’s boom microphone and, at a news conference later in Birmingham, Ala. Bush found himself explaining away his indiscretion. Kicking ass, said the adopted Texan, is “an old Texas football expression . . . and I stand behind it. That’s the way I talk, so get it accurate.”

He said that “anybody who’s ever been involved in athletics--particularly Texas athletics” knows that it’s “a way of expressing victory.” Not only did he admit using it all the time, but he said his kids use it. He acknowledged, however, that his mother, Dorothy, then 84, “will probably be disappointed in her son. It’s a generational thing.”

But this is 1991 and, linguistically speaking, just about anything goes.

“Someone respectable uses it in a respectable context” and it’s suddenly OK. “That’s exactly what happens,” says Edward Finegan, professor of linguistics at USC.

Words, he explains, go through a “process of amelioration” during which they pass through a taboo stage into general acceptance. “If you go back to Victorian times, the word pants was regarded as vulgar, an Americanism for pantaloons.”

Finegan suggests, too, that the feminist movement helped topple linguistic barricades.

“Much of the cautionary use of these kinds of words has been because people said, ‘Well, in mixed company you don’t use them.’ ” Once men and women feel free to say them in front of one another, he says, “then they can say them publicly.”

The origin of “kicking ass” seems unclear.

In the “New Dictionary of American Slang” by Robert L. Chapman it is a noun, described as college slang, to mean a good time. For example, “We went downtown and had a kicking ass.” Jonathon Green in “The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang” enters the phrase as a verb, meaning either “to beat someone up” or, in campus usage, “to have a good, if boisterous, time.”

Esther Lewin of Los Angeles, co-author with her husband Albert of “The Thesaurus of Slang,” says some slang “goes in and out of the language very quickly,” some stays and some disappears and returns. She believes “kicking ass” was originally a Southern term that gained currency among the military during the Vietnam war.

Dealing with vulgarities that have crept into common usage presents dilemmas for the media.

Allan M. Siegal, assistant managing editor of the New York Times, which used Bush’s “kick ass” quote, says it would be “a very different situation” if it were said by a person of less prominence.

“We don’t do it just for literary effect,” he adds. “The stronger the language, the harder we resist. We yield when at least very vulgar language turns up in the context of an important life-or-death matter of state, but we try very hard to keep it to a minimum, and a lot of our readers are offended by it.”

Times change, and the language changes, he adds, noting that publication of the Watergate transcripts accelerated that change.

“I think two years ago probably condom would have been not quite taboo but certainly confined to very serious health and science kinds of stories. . . . Now you see condoms in front page headlines discussing a controversy about whether to give them out in high schools.”

Says George Cotliar, managing editor of the Los Angeles Times: “It depends on the individual, it depends on the context . . . but we would prefer avoiding vulgarities.”

When The Times ran the transcript of the Watergate tapes, Cotliar recalls, “maybe once or twice we were compelled to use the expletive.” But, “that was a different time in a lot of respects.”

As for “kick ass,” Cotliar says, “If the President of the United States is talking about going to war against another nation, there are certain things you’re compelled to use, I think. You know also it’s going to be the sound bite over the lead on every television program.”

But, he adds, “If a reporter used it to spice his or her story, we’d unspice it.”

Joseph W. McQuaid, editor in chief of the conservative Manchester Union-Leader in New Hampshire, said his newspaper used Bush’s quote “with a good bit of reluctance” because it was in a “newsworthy” context.

McQuaid, who pulled a recent “Garfield” cartoon because a character used the word sucked , says, “I think newspapers are one of the last bastions (against indecent language). There’s still the phrase ‘family newspaper,’ and I’m sort of proud of that. But you have to try to report the real world. . . .”

According to Alexandra Wilson, special assistant to general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission, kick ass is permissible on broadcast stations because it is not “patently offensive under contemporary community standards.”

Even “the f-word” is permissible, she says, if used in a serious manner. And some newspaper executives say they would print that word, albeit reluctantly, if President Bush said it.

If Middle America was offended by Bush’s language, the White House claims not to have heard about it through its hot line. “We’ve gotten nothing recently about profanity or kicking butt or ass or what have you,” says a spokeswoman.

Ronald Butters, who chairs the linguistics program at Duke University and is editor of American Speech, a quarterly, does not find this lack of response surprising.

“General social change has altered mores in enormous numbers of ways, language as well as what kinds of bathing suits people wear, how much skin is permissible to show in a magazine ad, the works,” he says. “Language is just one reflection of the social change.”

Noting that Bush was “rather scorned” for describing the Ferraro debate as “kicking ass,” he attributes that partly to the fact that “he was dealing with a woman, and it seemed curiously inept.”

Butters points out, “Bush is not the first President to utter oaths and use blue language in the presence of reporters. . . .

“It’s certainly not something anyone would have found very unlikely coming out of the mouth of Lyndon Johnson and not anything anyone would have been surprised to hear from Richard Nixon.

“Maybe,” Butters suggests, “we’ve got Dick Nixon to kick around for that, too. Maybe Dick Nixon had something to do with the lowering of expectations for the reverence of a President.”