Curses! Can’t We All Just Forswear the Public Vulgarity?

At first, I found her letter amusing. Judging by the handwriting, I assumed she was a woman of some years, and she was writing to lament the vulgarity and profanity that runs amok in society and gets repeated in the mass media.

First, she cited then-Assembly Speaker Doris Allen’s published remarks in which she blamed “men with short penises” for orchestrating her political misfortunes. “Nothing wrong with the word ‘penis,’ but here it was vulgar,” the letter-writer said.

Then, she referred to a popular Los Angeles radio talk show in which she’d heard “piss” and “suck” spoken on the air the night before. “. . . only words, but came across as vulgar,” she wrote.

Then, a personal anecdote. “We live on a golf course,” she wrote, “and the most popular word used after a lousy stroke used to be the ‘s’ word. . . . Now it’s the ‘f’ word. Both vulgar.”

She suggested I write a column on the subject.

Unfortunately, I’m a hypocrite on the subject, or, should I say, of two minds when it comes to coarse speech. We all know people who are funny when they swear or use vulgarities. In his younger days, comedian Richard Pryor could give me a side-ache from laughing. Yet, like my letter-writer, I cringe when some loudmouth swears in public or when I see people walking around in T-shirts bearing vulgarisms. And, ooh, that bumper sticker: “How’s my driving? Call 1-800-EAT----” well, you know the rest.

I phoned my letter-writer/soulmate to sound her out some more. Her name is Ethel Asher and she lives in Placentia. “I’m old, but it just bugs me,” she said. She was saucy, and I liked her immediately.

“I still have yet to hear my husband utter his first swear word, and he’s no goody two-shoes,” she said. “And when I’m sewing and stick myself with a sewing needle, I’ve always said, ‘dammit to hell.’ Those are bad words, but I’ve never been around this real vulgar talk, and I don’t like it. I don’t like to see sweet kids talking like street bums.”

Mrs. Asher is 80 but plays golf and goes to roller-blade games at The Pond with her husband. She’s not isolated from the real world.

I asked if her objections are on religious grounds. “Not as far as I’m concerned, because I’m not religious,” she said. “And it doesn’t come from a non-drinker, either. I guess I’m just a regular individual. All I can say is that it is vulgar. In my golf group, we’re a bunch of little old ladies, we don’t talk like that. It’s unnecessary, because it’s vulgar and I have darling little grandkids, 10, 12, and 15, and when I heard them say, ‘sucks,’ I thought, ‘What is this world coming to?’ ”

Good question. I grew up during the 1960s when most language taboos went out the window. Words that used to get books banned now are commonplace in corporate boardrooms as well as bars.

Mary Ritchie Key is a professor emeritus of linguistics at UC Irvine. She has studied language and explored the “socio-linguistics” culture in which profanity and vulgarisms have flourished. She said her first exposure to the language subculture came in the ‘60s when she overheard a teen-age friend of her daughter using vulgarities extensively. “I had to sit down and figure why she was using them,” Key said. “I’m sure her parents didn’t know she was using them. She was a really nice girl, churchgoing.”

I don’t have space here to detail thoroughly her theories, but one of Prof. Key’s observations is that disturbed or angry people--of which our society abounds--use foul language as a release. “It’s some kind of a release of sickness, in the same way you vomit or have diarrhea.”

When she refers to sickness, she says, she means the whole range of social ills that afflict the national psyche and behavior. “Aren’t we going through a time now where we’re angry and there’s a loss of self-control?” she said.

“It moves into the area of masochistic, sadistic kind of thinking. [People say], ‘I have suffering, now you have to suffer, you have to listen because I’ve been hurting. I’ve been in pain. Now you have to listen to me.’ ”

She sees extreme profanity and vulgarity as the speech equivalent of violent action. In other words, language is letting off steam. “Aren’t emotions really important in human behavior?” she said. “So these are extreme emotional outlets, and they are important and they do make a difference, because people need that once in a while. The Victorian Age suppressed anger, and I don’t think that that was especially good for us, so we need a release. But we don’t need to go so far.

“I don’t think societies can function when any emotion can be expressed just any way you want. If you’re angry, you don’t go into a store and hit the first person you see. You control and release it in ways that are acceptable.”

Prof. Key predicts the rampant use of vulgarisms will subside. “I see it swinging to the extreme, where even people who use them freely are shocked by them. It seems that most people are aware we’ve gone too far, and the pendulum will swing back. Look what’s happening with [public discourse on] violence.”

This may be more of a treatise than Mrs. Asher wanted.

Admit it, though, wouldn’t you rather live in a world where the expression ‘dammit to hell’ is the people’s choice when it comes to epithets?

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.