When Words Betray Us

Vulgar language is like litter. Once you start noticing it, it’s all you see. Once the world looked merely lived-in. Then words like “oral sex” started showing up in the same breath with “Mr. President,” and pretty soon our national discourse was making junkyards look clean.

Suddenly, trash talk seemed to dot the landscape like cigarette butts. Suddenly, there was George Will on Sunday morning TV, throwing hissy fits about the coarsening of America. On the floor, the 3-year-old decided George’s hysteria was getting way too much attention, and announced that she was now going to read aloud.

“This book is a book called ‘Sex Sex Sex,’ ” she jabbered. “Mommy. Mommy. This book is--Mommy. This is a book. Called ‘Sex Sex Sex’! By Dr. Seuss!”

Yikes. Quickly we hustled everyone off to a festive family brunch, but it was too late: We were hysterical, too. “What the hell has gotten into the world?” I whispered to my husband, foolishly forgetting that our kids possess Linda Tripp-like powers to hear and repeat everything.

“Mommy, you said the H-word,” the first-grader reported, in a voice just loud enough for the retirees in the next booth to give me a look.

“But don’t worry,” she added. “It’s not really a bad word. Just inappropriate.”

Like “Mr. President” and “oral sex” in the same breath, I thought. Hysterically.

*

It’s hard to resist the urge to get worked up over language, because it is such a barometer. What you say is what you are. The way a society speaks will speak volumes--the oversized words that betray insecurity, the off-color words that spell arrested development. The bigoted words that advertise self-loathing. The straightforward words that signal wholeness and health.

But it is also hard to feel right complaining about language, because it is only a barometer. When your grade-schooler reports that “Zachary said ‘punk a--,’ ” your heart sinks, but you also see the report for what it is: the onset of the cuss-word phase.

So what is this phase? You have to wonder. The world does seem weirdly coarse. The A-word, which once upon a time you only were supposed to use publicly in reference to donkeys, is suddenly all over prime-time TV for reasons that I wish someone would explain. A new video featuring bleeped outtakes from the hostile Jerry Springer show reportedly has sold more than half a million copies in three months. A high school coach at a girl’s water polo meet at our local high school this week exhorted his kids to “beat the b----es” on the opposing team. Movies feature child actors reciting lines that only a person who never loved a child would write.

You find yourself yearning for the good old days, before this critical mass of crassness--but then, only to a point. Truth told, my own school years were full of kids who had to go stand in the cloakroom for muttering unprintable things they thought the teacher couldn’t hear.

I think life only seemed less polluted then because the barometer of common language didn’t measure common language. Unless you were rich or famous or Jack Paar on the “Tonight Show” making water closet jokes, the public didn’t know how you talked.

Today, everybody gets air time. Everybody registers. With technology has come democracy, and with democracy has come the litterbug lingo of Everyman. And Everyman is a mixed bag, part upside, part down. And once you start noticing that downside--yikes. It’s all you see.

*

The other night, my husband and I went to the movies, and on the way, we saw another run-in with words. We had stopped for gas at a well-lit station down the street from our suburban home, and nodded hello to the customer at the next tank.

He was a grandfatherly looking black man in a tailored wool coat and hat. His car was a new luxury sedan, forest green. It was early evening and quiet--so quiet, in fact, that we did a double take when a grimy van turned the corner and the man inside yelled out the window at the top of his lungs.

“Hey, n-----!” The van gunned it and roared off. There was a long minute of shocked silence. You hear about things like that, but until you witness it, you can’t imagine how obscene it feels. The gas station attendant ran out of the garage. “Did that guy say what I thought he said?” he asked. The black man shrugged sadly and nodded his head.

We felt like crying. All of us. Maybe there are places where such filth is common, but our community isn’t one of them. “I always thought this was a friendly town,” my husband said.

“No cause for concern,” the black man quietly replied. “This is nothing. I was in World War II. Get through that, you can get through anything. I’m doing fine.” He patted the top of his shiny new car. “This point in my life, I’m not gonna let something like that get me down.”

He topped off his gas tank and said good night. His back was straight. His head was high. Whatever the language barometer had picked up from that passing van, the only thing registering to us was the calming power of that other D-word: dignity.

Suddenly, the coarsening of society seemed less imminent. Suddenly trash talk was like a gum wrapper that might just as easily get thrown in the garbage as on the ground. Suddenly, there it was: the upside of the human spirit. And once you notice that, it’s all you see.

Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com