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Wednesday, August 03, 2005Still at Volokh's (see two posts below). This time the topic is cussing, cuss free zones and why cussing offends.I find the idea of a cuss free zone amusing in that cuss, in the first place, is a mispronunciation of curse. Does this mean they'll ban "darn" and "shoot"? As to the cussing: I have a few coworkers (cow-orkers, as Scott Adams would say) who cannot eschew the use of heartier words starting with F and S. My complaint, offered by one of Volokh's commenters: It's boooooooooooooooooring. And cheap. Vulgarities have their time and place. When that time comes, they should be used. With enthusiasm. Eugene detects reserves of anger that disquiet. Bullsh--! The proliferation of f-bombs is exactly the opposite. It's a substitute for anger and deeply felt emotion. Dropping an f-bomb is the equivalent of putting on blue jeans and turning up the hip-hop. When you do so, you join all the loserboys on streetcorners cussing up a storm to impress the girlies with manhood they haven't earned. From the gangbangers to the jerk in the parking lot, you're looking at a bunch of ninnies ready to explode with anger about having such drab, boring lives that they have to make messes and invent slights for there to be anything in their lives worth being angry over. Keeping it real, my a--! They're pretending it's real. At the local Safeway there's a clean-cut kid who spends his breaks standing at a closed checkout line trading f-bombs with whatever friend dropped by. It's offensive, and were I the manager, I'd teach him to smoke out back, thus removing this unseemly display from the view of the patrons. But since we're playing sociologist, let's look at what's really going on. Here you have a kid who put on his Safeway shirt, tied up his Safeway apron, clocked in on time and who has made enough of a habit of waiting on customers that he's kept his job at least four or five months. Dropping f-bombs? All he needs is a tatoo that says "I'm tuff" to complete the picture. It's another lower-middle-class "real-man" wannabe. The same description could be added of my coworkers, who doubtless view the potential alienation of the clientele as a small price to pay for being sure the other guy knows he's a real he-man, not just another jerk with a job and obligations. Why, though, does the f-bomb offend? Used correctly, it upsets - not necessarily offends - because it's meant to convey upset. Used in everyday conversation among pals, it - like blue jeans and hip-hop - is fine among friends because everyone knows everyone and it's part of the game. There are only two contexts, I suppose, where vulgarity really bothers me. I don't like the person who drops an expletive in relatively innocuous circumstances (bumper tapped in the parking lot, soda dropped on the sidewalk) because he's upset about something else. It really irritates me when I look around and realize it was me. (That's when the TurkeyBlogger gets out the Deepak meditation stuff :) ) The other context, though, were I detest vulgarity, is the one I've described above. The yahoo keeping it real because his real life isn't. And here, I think, the problem isn't anger, fear or anything else of the sort. It's wearing blue jeans to church, now that people don't go to church anymore. It's not a matter of being déclassé or uneducated or incapable of forming more precise speech, per se. It's more a matter of not knowing where you are, not realizing that you are transgressing boundaries as opposed to doing so deliberately and provocatively. An F-bomb irritates, then, not because it's vulgar, transgressive, angry or anything else of the sort. It irritates because of its thoughtlessness and narcissism, the failure of the utterer to realize that an outside world exists that might have better things to do with its time and hearing than take in his efforts to convince he and his friends that he might just be a man. As if. 
posted by gbarto at 4:03 PM |
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