Wall Street Journal Reviews of 'In Praise Of Profanity' and 'What The F'

Sept. 16, 2016 2:32 p.m. ET Cussing sure isn’t what it used to be. These days it seems nearly impossible to horrify, or impress, with a display of nuclear nomenclature. Even the pope has publicly dropped something of an F-bomb, which unleashed a fallout of yawns. It seems we’re all stevedores now. Which is not necessarily a negative development, at least according to a pair of language experts whose books illuminate profanity’s pilgrimage from the gutter to the basilica. With “In Praise of Profanity,” Michael Adams, an English professor at Indiana University, insists that we are living in a kind of golden age of profanity, so designated “because we can use profanity to satisfy multiple human and linguistic needs better now than at any previous time in history, without much constraint.” In “What the F,” Benjamin K. Bergen, who teaches cognitive science at the University of California, is similarly exuberant, calling his book a “coming-out party for the cognitive science of swearing.” One expects Lenny Bruce and George Carlin will be put up for sainthood any day now. Who would be surprised? Words that once sent offenders to the pillory and introduced countless youngsters to the taste of soap now trip off the daintiest of tongues. In fact, deploying the soap cure may earn parents a visit from child protective services while a failure to cuss might be deemed “putting on airs.” So how did we get here? Pretty quickly, writes Mr. Adams, who has “witnessed the devulgarization of most profanity during my lifetime.” Harper’s magazine, he notes, first used the F-word in 1968, though the New Yorker’s Harold Ross held longer to his standard of not publishing anything that would, according to one biographer, “bring a blush to the cheek of a 12-year-old girl.” New Yorker writer Renata Adler thought that by the 1960s the “strongest Anglo-Saxon words in the language were so common that their power was nearly gone.” The shift (or obliteration) of standards was accomplished by endless envelope pushing, some of which seems quaint to our jaded ears. Older readers will recall the uproar over the early pop song “Louie, Louie,” which these days would probably pass muster as a Baptist wedding recessional. Mr. Adams implicitly celebrates Bluto Blutarsky and his frat brothers for their role in the great re-alignment. “Since Animal House,” he writes of the 1978 classic, “. . . we’re all a little vulgar.” And Bluto has been eclipsed by the likes of Tony Soprano, a full-throated Caruso of cursing. Anyone wondering how language pros spend their working hours will find enlightenment in Mr. Adams’s study of “The Sopranos.” Through careful counting he has established that in 81% of the show’s episodes there was more than one profanity per minute, and in 22% there were at least 100 profanities. In the 85 monitored episodes there were 7,037 “profane instances.” These tallies amount to a loss for civility but a victory for the scriptwriters, who were clearly not penalized for unimaginative repetition. Readers who fear that the professors might analyze the blood (or other fluids) out of their subject will find some confirmation of their concerns. In both books, words and deeds that formerly raised eyebrows soon begin to lower them to doze position, though Mr. Bergen does perk things up a bit by including photographs of people cussing in sign language. Who would have ever guessed that a properly coached thumb could be so expressive? Mr. Bergen also includes interesting facts about organs other than those associated with the body’s exhaust or reproductive systems, especially the brain, which, he reports, consumes 20% of the body’s energy while only constituting 2% of its weight. Inequality, it seems, knows no boundaries. He writes that people who sustain brain damage that obliterates their ability for normal conversation often retain their ability to cuss, comforting us with the possibility that even after a stroke we might still spew properly spiced bile if not the Preamble to the Constitution. Mr. Bergen’s investigation of the pope’s F-bomb (which occurred on March 2, 2014) will likely bring comfort to the faithful: He gives the pontiff a pass, attributing the incident to a mere slip of the tongue. In an address from the Vatican balcony, Pope Francis attempted the Italian word for “example” and ended up striking an inadvertent blue note. Most people, he notes, commit speech errors at a rate of one or two for every 1,000 words, which works out to one error for every 10 minutes of speech. And we all know how the pope can go on. It was only a matter of time. Not that Mr. Bergen would have minded if His Holiness had purposely loosed a linguistic loogie. Both authors believe that profanity can be unparalleled in its expressive powers and even work physical wonders. Mr. Bergen writes that, while common civility would ideally tame slurring tongues, courts might one day attempt to apply a legal gag. In some places, of course, an ill-considered religious slur can earn you a starring role in an Internet beheading epic. “Context is everything,” Mr. Adams writes, reasonably enough, though some readers may take exception to his view that we don’t cuss enough. “Women should swear more, and they might as well start swearing while they are girls, right alongside the boys.” Sharing a similar evangelical tone, Mr. Bergen says that “there’s no evidence” that profanity harms children and only inconclusive evidence that children who hear profanity are more likely to use it. Harm is difficult to measure, and it is easy enough to sympathize with youngsters who deploy formerly taboo words to spice up an otherwise mundane existence (and perhaps rattle their parents). Yet he who rises from his flippin’ ( Andy Capp’s preferred version of the word) bed to eat his flippin’ breakfast before playing his flippin’ videogame till his flippin’ fingers fall off has still, at the end of the flippin’ day, not been up to much—except for sounding like a linguistic drone. Which, besides being mindless, may be a form of self-deception. Words meant to spice up reality might also conceal its fundament vacuousness. There may also be something diminishing about fixating on words that, for the most part, describe entities and events found south of the beltline. While there are many variations—Mr. Adams says researchers have identified 1,740 words for sexual intercourse, 1,351 for the part of the male anatomy that the Brits call “wedding tackle,” 1,180 for the related female technology, and 540 for the activities that inspired the creation of the diaper and chamber pot—most people suffice with a few default obscenities. Most parents would prefer that their children spout Shakespeare than sound as if they are perpetually stepping on a nail, just as they’d prefer that their children master the violin instead of the kazoo. Yet it’s also true that a world without salty language would be a tasteless porridge. Mr. Bergen reports, amazingly, that the Japanese language includes no swear words. Perhaps profanity’s ascendancy will eventually bore people into finding new and more interesting ways to express themselves. For now, however, anyone hoping to escape the triumph of what was once called “gutter talk” should either lance his eardrums or consider relocating to Japan.

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