The future of cussing

A PG rant about R-rated language

Like all of us in this writerly space, I love words — words flowing through books or blogs, words bounced around a dinner table, words launched from a stage like tractor beams to reel the audience into a new world. And I admit that throughout my adult life, I’ve particularly enjoyed using the bold words, the ones that invoke shock and awe, whenever the moment seemed right.

I have always loved to cuss. It’s my last remaining vice, I think. I don’t drink any more, I don’t do drugs, I’ve stopped smoking, limited caffeine and meat and sugar—so cussing has remained my last resort for stress relief. But now, with so many more people using so many more cuss words, I’m afraid the shock and awe and, yes, the fun has gone flat out of it. Why?

When everybody’s cussing, nobody’s cussing.

Has anyone else realized this? My beloved shock-and-awe words are now everywhere, as common as bedbugs. I resent this state of affairs, just a little. I suppose it’s like seeing one’s designer handbag newly knocked-off and for sale on the corner for $29.99. Not that I care so much about handbags. It’s the principle of the thing.

When cusswords are too common, we lose a major means of disrupting a conversation, of provoking irreverence, hilarity, bonding, and ever-more-daring insights. These days, the only way I can really disrupt a conversation is to mention God. But I don’t proselytize, so that’s usually a bust, too.

But we don’t cuss just to get attention, I hope. We also need words that register extremes, depths, heights. In previous centuries, a man in complete despair might exclaim, “Egad!” and tear at his hair, sobbing. What could we say now, for similar effect? I honestly don’t know the code any more.

So I’ve been thinking about the devaluation of cusswords and what it means for conversation, and more importantly, the writing I am working toward.

Cussing and artistic snobbery

Cussing used to be a way to signal membership in the avant-garde; in the counterculture world of the 1970s, it was important to show that one was not merely a slave to bourgeois prudery.

As an actress in my early days, I would quote the 1955 play Inherit the Wind:

“I don’t swear just for the hell of it. You see, I figure language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we ought to use all the words we’ve got. Besides, there are damned few words that everybody understands.”

I suspect that I and the other would-be artists were mostly, as they say, rebels without a clue. I believe we thought that cussing would somehow destabilize the status quo, free the oppressed, perhaps, even end the war. It felt that powerful.

“Après moi, le deluge”

But as taboos and restrictions continued to fall through the end of the 20th century, commercial interests tracked the public’s tastes and tolerance and reacted accordingly. The Hays Office fussily vetted the language in films until it gave up and dissolved itself in 1966, in favor of “voluntary standards.” We all know how well “voluntary standards” work when there’s money to be made. A rating system followed, and films began to change — not always for the better, but that’s another topic.

Television held the line against Carlin’s “Seven Words” for a while, but then came cable. In comedy, Richard Pryor and others showed us the deep humanity, pain, and rage that often lies beneath the language of shock. Popular music got grittier, and even video games, I am told. I don’t know what to make of video games that aren’t Tetris. No cussing in Tetris, except from me. Because you never get a stick when you need a stick. That’s just a fact.

Out of the gutters; out of the bistros

In just a few decades, the rudest words burst forth from the galleries and green rooms into the malls, offices, boardrooms, playgrounds, schools, and the most pedestrian parts of the country. Sure, they were probably there all along, but burgeoning, 24-hour media connectivity made everything seem visible and audible to all of us. And in addition to the talk and lives of regular people, the electronic flood of obscene and pornographic content became so vast that it can surely never be contained until all the seas boil dry.

So why am I all disgruntled about whether or not I can still get a good pursed lip from a reader when I use an f-word?

It’s because I believe we need to be able to shock — we need to be able to swear. It’s been proven by science to be good for us. So what will it take to ratchet down our current level of hyperbole? I have no ready answer; I just want to get ready for the release of the next version of our shared lexicon of profanity. Cussing 2.0, perhaps.

When we need to let it all out

I make a distinction here between talking and writing, of course. Cussing in real life helps with pain, stress relief, and all that, and I’m pretty sure I’ll still be cussing in my home life.

Take the f-word, for example. It’s still an enormously satisfying word to say. (Fricative + a sort of a grunt + plosive, I think.) In speech, it retains little of its original meaning, so it’s highly versatile. Uses for the f-word are even more numerous than the ways to cook shrimp that Bubba lists so thoroughly in the movie Forrest Gump.

Blasphemy is a little different. A ministerial colleague once thoughtfully said that swearing (i.e., blaspheming) was, in a way, just a short form of prayer. Maybe. My grandfather had very painful arthritis, and would sincerely ask God to damn that arthritis every time it smote him with pain, which was dozens of times a day. Apparently, Grandfather’s “short form” prayers were too short, since they did not seem to be effective.

But while my reflex cussing may sometimes do me good, it’s also possible that sometimes that cussing and fussing is just keeping me all worked up. But what else can I safely do about the fools on the road who don’t know how to drive? In private, I’ll still be cussing, I’m pretty sure.

“This is going on your permanent record, missy.”

Perhaps you remember being told things would be going “on your permanent record.” It was a threat some of us should have taken more seriously, perhaps, as decades old tweets and emails and videos surface, records of people saying and doing things they are mortified to admit today. The writing we do now leaves electronic traces that many of us blithely thought for years could be “deleted.” Certainly we would never deliberately write anything we’d be ashamed of later— but I have found myself developing a hyper-sensitivity to my normal lexicon while writing in this space.

As a writer, I admit I’m envious of those of us who “work blue” so well in their posts and essays, keeping the shock and awe fresh and satisfying. But writers need to be aware of their own specialties. Much as I love to cuss in the car, I’m not sure it would suit my writing voice, which aspires to some blend of humor + absurdity + spirituality + deathwish + retro sass. Or whatever it is I’m putting out there.

Biology isn’t even close to destiny

In addition, I have become cranky about the limited range of our cusswords. Biological cusswords are taboo because they relate to certain taboo functions of our bodies, specifically elimination and copulation. (I wonder why those two functions? They’re necessary; they’re pleasurable in different ways. So are eating, sneezing, sleeping, and breathing, but we don’t get all in a twist about those functions, do we?)

But these days, those poor human biological taboo-words aren’t nearly adequate to express the things we need to express. Be literal-minded for a second. Think about war; perhaps you are outraged by war, because it results in millions of people dead, wounded, and displaced; trillions of dollars spent; untold spiritual and psychological damage to the soldiers and to each individual in the society. I’m not trying to be a smart-alec, here, but saying “War is sh*tty” is truly an insult to sh*t.

Or let’s say I’m writing about the very real climate crisis we are in. And let’s say I want to signal and provoke rage, alarm, and defiance about what is surely a worldwide threat. If I write, “Because of the climate crisis, we’are all f*cked,” I have completely underrepresented the situation. That amiable, human vulgarism was simply not up to the descriptive task. It is no wonder my statement drops into the public sphere without making a ripple.

If my words are ever unearthed, decades or centuries later, I won’t mind if they are seen as crude. But I’ll be posthumously embarrassed if future humans think I was comparing human lovemaking to the violent, sociopathic rape of a planet.

Back to basics

Writers perhaps comprise only a fraction of those who influence the language of the public sphere. The forces of commerce, politics, and power exert constant pressure on all of us to worship dollars and doodads; to believe our leaders have our best interest at heart; and to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Nevertheless, we still have a role, however humble, in advancing our ideas so as to have a positive effect on our culture.

What I am trying to do is let the “cussword impulse” in my writing signal my internal editor to look one level deeper, for a more powerful choice. In a way, cusswords have become like any other meaningless intensifier. I recall Mark Twain’s advice:

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

Sometimes I need a good cussword as a rhythmic tool to make a unit or a phrase scan better, to land the the reader on the point of emphasis right. It works great (“Ab-so-effing-lutely!”). But since the deluge, those grace notes can seem gratuitous and therefore distracting. So, instead, I’ll simply scan the phrase and try to fix it like a line of poetry.

Sometimes the urge for a cussword tells me I need deeper emphasis. Then, I have to take an extra minute to ask: what have I not yet said about that thing, or that person, or that idea that made me nervously or angrily or contemptuously or sarcastically invoke feces, or fornication, or somebody’s nether anatomy, or whatever? The reality itself, properly understood and candidly told, should be more effective than an expletive, which is actually a euphemism in this case. So I’m trying to look for that depth instead. “Go big or go home, Sparky,” I mutter under my breath.

There are many ways to do something right

Remember — I promised no answers, and I’ve made good on that promise. But let me share some suggestions I’m trying to follow:

• I’ll keep searching for other ways to capture attention in a world where stimulus is surplus and attention is scarce.
• I’ll keep exploring how we have exhausted our superlatives, so that “literally” doesn’t mean “literally” any more, and we usually say that someone is “awesome” just for giving our change back. So we’re short of words to use when the apocalypse comes, you see. Perhaps I’ll just stop using adjectives or making judgments and just describe what I see or hear or perceive.
• I’ll keep listening for new comparisons for things, especially fearsome conditions or dangerous people. Bodily functions just aren’t such a nasty thing any more. We need words that call out the oligarchy, the hidden puppetmasters, the system that has created a sort of Faraday cage of the globe comprising media, social media, money, debt, and the online culture, that have disempowered us so.
• I’m also going to keep seeking names to call other drivers, because I’m not a saint yet and some people just don’t know how to change lanes.
• And one day I will surely gain the highest levels of enlightenment, and I will no longer need to use any of those coarse, judgmental, angry, cathartic words.

Gosh. That will be swell.

Thanks for reading Writers Guild — A Smedian publication

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