Coarseness and Cursing at an Early Age

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            “Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”

— Mark Twain

 

One summer day when I was about 5, I was playing in the backyard of our home at 27 Valley St. in Allenstown. N.H. With a toy hammer, I was pounding plastic pegs into a wooden case that had rectangles, circles, triangles, and squares cut into the surface.  Unsurprisingly, given how I turned out, I was either trying to hammer a square-cut peg into a round hole or a round peg too large to fit into the square hole.

I didn’t notice that my mom had come out to watch her cute oldest son play. When I hit my thumb with the toy hammer, I exclaimed, “That f**ing hammer!” In a flash, my mom was on me like white on rice, flailing at me and yelling, “Don’t ever use that word again!” It is one of my earliest memories that has survived the decades.

Of course, being 5, I knew neither what the word meant nor why it had evoked such a strong reaction in my mom. I never again used the F-word in the presence of my mother. It is not as if my parents were prudes when it came to foul language. My dad cussed like the sailor he once was, serving as a radarman on the U.S.S. Norris, a destroyer, during the Korean War. But he assiduously avoided using the F-word in my mom’s presence, or around us boys, at least until we were grown.

I think one of my older cousins taught me the F-word by using it as a noun, adjective, and verb, sprinkling it into his vocabulary like snow flurries during a New Hampshire winter — as long as no adults were present. My mom had five siblings, all but one of whom lived in the area, so there was a gaggle of cousins often gathering at our grandparents’ house in the country outside Concord — plenty of cousins from whom to learn profanity.

My mom also was capable of foul language, though she avoided breaking the Third Commandment — or the F-word, of course. I generally follow her example. That said, I also am no prude, but the coarsening of discourse in all areas of society often bothers me. What got me to thinking about this was when the present occupant of the Oval Office said on June 24 at a press briefing before departing on Marine One: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f**k they’re doing.”

This was not a case of being caught on a hot mic, a phenomenon that has happened to countless public officials. It was deliberate and, by all counts, the first time in U.S. presidential history that the F-word was used in a public setting. Another norm broken, although it pains me to admit that I agree with his sentiment.

I am not singling out Presidential Orange Skull for coarseness. Such language has crept into every aspect of culture. Last year, I watched “Succession,” the highly popular television series loosely based on the Murdoch family (whose newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, is now being sued by POS). I found the show compelling, but at times grew tired of the F-bombs flying around every conversation. It was used as a noun, adjective, adverb, and verb, sometimes in the same sentence. A graduate student might devise a master’s thesis by doing a content analysis of the series and calculating how much shorter it would have been if all the F-bombs were eliminated. A one-hour show might be cut to 45 minutes!

An article published last year in The Saturday Evening Post (published in print six times annually, nearly two centuries after its founding) found that Baby Boomers (I’m one, as is POS) use profanity 10 times a day. In comparison, members of Gen Z (1997-2012) swear two dozen times a day. I think POS might be skewing the average for us Baby Boomers.

I found numerous peer-reviewed articles concluding that the use of profanity has increased. One article, published in 2021, studied a set of 16 swear words. That reminded me of the late comedian George Carlin’s 1972 Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television monologue. I will not repeat any of them here, though one can almost hear all of them watching non-network television. The 2021 article concluded males still swore more than females, and use of profanity went down the older one got. Again, POS skews the result.

Most of my profanity occurs in the confines of my vehicle, muttered imprecations under my breath as I get stuck at a traffic light or cut off by a driver who pays more attention to their phone than the road. I avoid using it in my writing with rare exceptions, hewing to what my late mentor Glenn McCutchen often said: Don’t put anything in the newspaper you wouldn’t want your mother to read.

In the case of my late mom, that could have been a relatively low bar — mainly avoiding the F-word or taking the Lord’s name in vain. I wish she were still around to ask.

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