Coarsening the Culture
By Jeffrey Page
For years I’ve been concerned about the debasement of our society as a result of the transfer of certain words from the do-not-say list to common, everyday nouns and verbs.
Note: This is not a call for government to send in the speech cops or the thought police. Nor is it about private speech between and among individuals. Rather it’s about my dismay that we’ve reached a point where you hear little boys and girls using “it sucks” as a statement of disapproval as in “The Mets? They suck.” You’d think parents would understand that “sucks,” used in this sense, derives from half a word used to describe someone who performs fellatio. And what parent wouldn’t jump at the chance to change their child’s vocabulary if it meant avoiding having to explain fellatio to a 5-year old?
The casual use of “sucks” is all around us. Not long ago I heard a commercial on radio for a book entitled “Your Marketing Sucks,” in which some guy promises to improve your business operation if you’d only read his book.
The casual use of “cojones” has been building for years. This Spanish vulgarism for testicles often is used to connote courage as in the English vulgarism “balls.” The formal word for “testicles” is the far less colorful sounding “testículos.” But “cojones” recently lost some of its ability to startle when, during an interview on Fox, Sarah Palin let fly with “Jan Brewer has the cojones that our president does not.” Brewer, the governor of Arizona, is a woman but this subtlety was lost on Palin.
In fact, she never missed a beat, never slowed down to consider her coarseness, never realized how ridiculous she sounded in her anatomically erroneous discussion of a woman’s cojones.
(And why should she? After all, it was Palin who assured the nation in 2008 that Alaska’s proximity to Siberia made her sufficiently qualified in foreign relations to be vice president.)
The irony – or hypocrisy – was too rich to ignore. Fox viewers might have been left scratching their heads and wondering what happened to Palin’s own “cojones.” Didn’t she quit as governor of Alaska as an ethics investigation was about to get underway?
The public crassness continues in the current issue of The New Yorker, which contains a full-page ad for the new Showtime series “The Big C.” The show is about a woman’s confronting her cancer. The kicker in the ad: “Grabbing life by the balls.”
In 2004, the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, was angered by Senator Patrick Leahy’s hard questioning of him about the Halliburton Corporation. “Go f–k yourself,” Cheney advised Leahy. It was on the floor of the Senate, which used to be known as the world’s greatest deliberative body.
The recently released movie “Dinner for Schmucks” is rated PG-13. The parental advisory at the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDb.com) notes, “A man’s ex-girlfriend sneaks into his house. She is in a revealing outfit. She then proceeds to have sex with another man by making sexual remarks (so her boyfriend can hear.)”
The advisory also notes the script’s use of “f–k,” “s–t,” “bitch,” “ass,” and “hell” and adds that “God’s and Jesus’ names are abused many times as well.”
Just think, some genius at the Motion Picture Association of America gets paid to decide that “f–k,” “s–t,” “bitch,” “ass,” and “hell” are OK for children over 13.”
But nowhere do the producers explain that “schmuck,” while commonly used to refer to a dimwit, is the Yiddish word for “penis.” If “Dinner for Schmucks” is acceptable now, can “Dinner for Dickheads” be far behind?
Speaking of movie titles, remember “Meet the Fockers” of a few years back? My sense was that you were supposed to read the advertisements for the movie and be sufficiently titillated to make the connection between Fockers and f–kers. I checked IMDb.com and sure enough, there it was: “The surname Focker plays on the F word.” This movie also was rated PG-13.
Any number of times on New York radio, I have heard raging talk show hosts refer to the people they disliked as “a-holes” and “scumbags.”
So there you are, driving the family to a ball game with the radio tuned to some talker. And all of a sudden your kid asks, “Mom, what’s a scumbag?” Go ahead, rehearse a response.
Am I making too big a deal of this or have we been witness to and, by our inaction, participants in the degrading of our lives?
What’s your take on this?
Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com
Tags: Jeffrey Page
August 12th, 2010 at 4:58 am
Hello, Jeff Page,
Your article is on the mark. The coarsening of our language has been building for years. And it has been spreading like a virus. And as you point out so well, it is now the coinage of women and children.
It is the language of the barracks I heard daily when I was in the military.
And when it is used in films, on tv, and in print media, it is “respectable.”
The use of the “f” word is as common as cereal. The problem I have with vulgarities is that they sound so unpleasant, so harsh, so…so…well, vulgar.
Good piece, Jeff.
August 12th, 2010 at 6:24 pm
Nice, thought-provoking piece, Jeffrey. I am reminded of a scene at an NHL playoff game at Madison Square Garden during the 1970s. The Boston Bruins were in town to play the Rangers and their “bad-boy” center, Derek Sanderson, drew the ire of the New York fans. Security guards took away a sign from a fan that said, “Derek Eats S***!” However, another guy whose sign said, “Derek IS Drek!” was allowed to keep his.