Using 328 Words When, in the End, Just One Would Do

Occasionally our lawmakers are obliged, or think themselves obliged, to make laws prohibiting public display of certain parts of the body, in the interest of public morals.

In these endeavors most lawmakers beat hopelessly about the bush, trying to define parts whose common names evidently are thought too vulgar for use in public ordinances.

Legislators who would have no qualms in calling the human fundament by its more common name in private are obliged to call it the buttocks in their solemn councils. Buttocks, it seems to me, is a much uglier word than the three-letter word most of us use when referring to this part of the body, male or female.

Oddly, the British word arse is generally acceptable in some quarters though its American equivalent usually is not. Thus, we find hardened baseball players quoted as saying that they’re going to to “kick butt,” when we know very well that that is not what they said.

Obviously, there are words that are truly obscene, and may not be used in public or in respectable publications. I am not suggesting that such words be admitted into polite conversation.

But the attempts of lawmakers to avoid common terms are ludicrous. H. E. McDonald of Rancho Palos Verdes has sent me an AP story from the Maui News about the verbose attempts by the commissioners of St. Augustine County, Fla., to write an anti-nudity law.

It seems some residents had complained about a new restaurant at the edge of town that featured nude dancers. The commissioners sought to write a law banning this evil.

To help them in this creative process they used female mannequins as models. They studied the mannequins, then decided which body parts must be covered.

In the delicate business of defining buttocks the commissioners employed 328 words, beginning: “Buttocks: The area at the rear of the human body (sometimes referred to as the gluteus maximus) which lies between two imaginary lines running parallel to the ground when a person is standing, the first or top of such lines being one-half inch below the top of the vertical cleavage of the nates (i.e., the prominence formed by the muscles running from the back of the hip to the back of the leg) and the second or bottom line being one-half inch above the lowest point of the curvature of the fleshy protuberance (sometimes referred to as the gluteal fold), and between two imaginary lines, one on each side of the body (the outside lines), which outside lines are perpendicular to the ground and to the horizontal lines described above and which perpendicular outside lines pass through the outermost point(s) at which each nate meets the outer side of each leg. . . .”

The AP story notes that Webster’s New World Dictionary defines the plural of buttocks simply as “the rump.”

Why didn’t the commissioners say so?

The commissioners also used 70 words to define breast , which is defined in the dictionary by 15 words--”either of two milk-secreting glands protruding from the upper part of a woman’s body.”

I am reminded of a similar ordinance enacted several years ago by some local body (I believe it was the Board of Supervisors) defining such body parts in terms of inches from this imaginary line or that, and using various euphemisms to avoid saying what they meant.

This law was designed to cover dancers and waitresses in topless bars and go-go joints, which were then proliferating, but I doubt that it was ever enforced. Can you imagine an officer actually going on stage and measuring a dancer’s anatomy according to the definitions of the law? I’m sure the young women would have been able to sue for assault and lewd conduct. All that law proved was that legislators are abominable writers.

I am puzzled that the common word for buttocks is regarded as obscene or vulgar. It is perfectly unobjectionable in its other meanings--for example, that beast of burden, the ass. We may also say in polite society that a person has made an ass of himself.

My thesaurus gives the following synonyms for buttocks: rump, posterior, dorsal or lumbar regions, hindquarters, haunches, loins, fundament, nates, seat, bottom, fanny, rear or rear end, backside, behind, butt, duff, tail, beam, keister, pratt, arse, buns, cheeks and heinie. It also includes the common three-letter word that I am enjoined from using.

So ingrained is the injunction against that word, however, that even in a Biblical context, and in its innocent meaning, as a donkey, it is regarded as impiously humorous. When I was a little boy in Sunday school I sometimes had to read aloud such passages as this from Joshua 15:18, about the bride Achsah, “ . . . she came unto him . . . and she alighted from her ass.” I was mortified.

I suggest that our lawmakers either learn how to write basic English or leave public morals to the people.