[Below is a guest essay from my altered-ego D.L. For more, go to https://laskenlog.blogspot.com/ (sorry, links aren't working, please cut and paste). All the best, Harry]
Isn’t it odd that a word can be bad?
Odd, that is, that the word itself is bad, not its referent. And odd that
there’s no clear logic behind the bad word’s badness. For instance, “murder”
and “torture” refer, in most people’s minds, to bad things, but the words are
not bad. The word “fuck,” however, is bad, though it doesn’t refer to anything
bad in an absolute sense.
"Fuck" is probably the most
bad of the bad words, though, as noted, its referent, expressed acceptably in
Latin as "copulate," ("couple together") is morally
neutral. Why is "fuck" bad and "copulate" is not?
History demonstrates the agonized
process. Christian Konrad Sprengel, 18th century German naturalist, was
the first academician to suggest that flowers are sexual organs. For his pains
he was hounded out of polite society and his work vilified. Today it is common
knowledge that a wholly female flower is a type of vagina, that male-only
flowers are types of penises, and hermaphroditic flowers are cocks with pussies
attached that fuck themselves.
The point being that Sprengel turned “flower” into a bad
word.
"Badness," apparently, is sexuality. That's a tough call when sexuality supports the imperative to reproduce. If sexuality is designated bad, does that make reproduction bad?
The ban against the English word for excrement is a separate puzzle. If we already abhor shit, why do we need to reinforce the abhorrance with language bans?
Teachers are expected to figure out such scientific and philosophical questions on their own, without a word of guidance from credential programs or staff development. As an elementary and high school
teacher I spent a lot of time and energy in pursuit of what I thought was a societal goal: dissuading children from
saying bad words that denote sexual organs, various sex acts and/or
excrement. In this essay I ponder what I was trying to accomplish, and what our
culture is trying to accomplish by designating certain words "bad."
I’m a crossover person who remembers
bygone eras. In 1955 my family went to see the movie “Picnic” because we’d
heard that William Holden said “damn." A hushed, almost worshipful
audience awaited the big moment, and when the word was uttered a gasp in unison
pervaded the theater. The movie producer’s gamble had paid off: box office
dividends from a bad word. Few at that time realized that the dam was about to
burst (sorry).
Fast forward to San Francisco State,
1969- my Chaucer professor charges breathlessly into the classroom.
Instead of giving us a page number to find, he asks if we’ve heard what’s going
on at U.C. Berkeley. A student named Mario Savio and an army of dedicated young people have
taken a stand for free speech, he informs us. We can say “fuck” if we want to!
Add cable TV and the rest is history.
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Thank you
Mario!
Fast forward from the 60's to 1983,
when, as a new elementary school teacher in south L.A., I face a demure
little black girl who, standing before my desk, has just said, “fuck.” There is
no context, just the word, hanging understated in the air. I track down the
mother’s work number and call. The mother’s response: “Let me get this
straight. You called me at work to tell me my daughter said ‘fuck’?”
“Er…yes…” I stammer, and realize I need
a zeitgeist upgrade.
Fast forward a few years and I'm a high
school English teacher, listening all day to kids speak in linguistic abandon.
Like everything else in our society,
our language protocols are in a state of flux. At times of head-spinning
change, it's helpful to ponder history. The Norman invasion of England in
1066 gives needed background. The Normans spoke French, although they were
only two generations removed from their Viking ancestry, and they imposed their
language on the indigenous Anglo-Saxons, whom they despised beyond words,
especially four letter words. The Anglo-Saxons said things like “fuck” and
“shit,” scum that they were, while the Normans, heirs to Latin through French, could say copuler and defequer.
The ex-Vikings were so ashamed of their past that their descendents kept it hidden all the way through the textbooks of my youth. The "Normans," as they preferred to be called, may have heard a guttural sexuality in Anglo-Saxon language that reminded them of the lowly language of their grandparents, who were descended from scattered boat people in the boondocks up north. At this point the Normans did not want to emulate Germanic tribes- the ones who had resisted Rome the most- who marauded around Europe's forests like savages instead of paving roads through them. The Norman dream was to leave the primative Viking culture behind and become Latinized aristocrats, but that required multisyllabication and words that are not evocative of animals rutting.
Thus Savio's battle continued the thousand-year struggle to free the Anglo-Saxon mother tongue.
The "four-letter" words do of
course have another property: they carry emotion. Compare these two
sentences:
There are dog feces on the mat.
There's dog shit on the fucking mat!
The first sentence is devoid of
emotion, an expression of information only; the second, identical to the first
except for two bad words, a contraction and an exclamation mark, explodes with
emotion. It is their prohibition that has attached emotional power to
the bad words. They are forbidden... special. The
process has given us useful words that express levels of emotion other words
cannot.
Once the prohibition has been gone long
enough, the words' power will diminish.
In the high school portion of my
teaching career I formulated a policy on the goodness or badness of words based
on their usefulness. Plethora I identified as a bad word because it’s
ugly and show-offy, making its common synonyms more useful. When we read
an Anglo-Saxon bad word in literature, I encouraged students to assess the
word's usefulness in its context. Words are either useful or they're not.
They are useful if they carry meaning and force; they are not useful if they
don’t. If I have to hear “mother-fucker” all fucking day, that phrase is not
useful. If it's only once in a while, well….
