THE EVOLUTION OF PROFANITY

I was sitting on the back deck with my brother-in-law the other weekend, drinking beer and ranting away about something or other. Might have been the great global warming swindle, or the feminist conspiracy to turn Natural Selection against males, or the atrophied work ethic among residents of the have-not provinces – one of those subjects the beau frere, a coal geologist, and I like to agree upon at noisy length when we’re in our cups.

Anyway at some point my 19-year-old daughter Alice, a freshman liberal arts major at U of A who practices yoga and actually likes foods made from black beans - but whom I love dearly all the same - plopped herself and her organic cider cooler down at the table and, like her mother before her, applied a critical ear to daddy’s rantings.

“Stop it, Dad,” she said, after a while. “You sound like a teenage boy.”

Alice was not talking about the subject of my diatribe, but the style in which it was delivered – a style that, I suddenly realized, was largely dependent on the use of the fuck-word and the shit-word and their variations for its rhetorical oomph. I don’t think I had yet used the cunt-word or the cocksucker-word but it probably was just a matter of time.

I was both ashamed and a little pleased at Alice for calling me out. Ashamed because of the hypocrisy. I have habitually chided my three lovely daughters whenever they have ventured into profane or blasphemous utterance. And, in the not too distant past, I’ve prevented the younger ones from watching movies – Little Miss Sunshine comes to mind – that contained the sort of language I was now emitting in front of Alice.

My pleasure at Alice’s reaction came from the antiquated part of me that misses the day when one watched one’s language in front of the gentler sex. Alice’s scolding suggested that that gentler sex, even in a world where the scabrous likes of Amy Winehouse, South Park, and Will Farrell movies are shaping our babies, remains gentler sex, and that one must watch one’s language when its members are present. Maybe God isn’t dead after all.

Part of the reason I was swearing so much is the influence of my new work environment. Everyone on the jobsite, from the shyest electrician to the mouthiest steelworker to the dudes delivering the drywall speak in what Tom Wolfe, in I Am Charlotte Simmons, his novel about the decadence of Ivy League American colleges, called the “fuck patois.” No rancor, nor even emphasis need be present for the expletives –most commonly fuck and its conjugations - to be inserted at an average rate of two per sentence. ‘Twas always thus, perhaps, but I get the feeling it’s more thus now.

Brian, the site superintendent and a journeyman carpenter, likes to use the arcane measure of the “cunt-hair” – as in “nail your moulding just a cunt-hair to the right of the door frame.” This hearty alternative to the micron makes me wonder how and why “just a hair” morphed into “just a cunt-hair” (which, come to think of it, might even be an authentically Canadian locution.) Is the female pube of a markedly smaller gauge than the hair of the head? My experience, though admittedly not vast, would suggest the opposite. I suspect, however, that some tradesman, riffing on the wonderful music of his profanity, spontaneously coined the term, others liked its sound, and it so entered into construction site usage.

A couple of years ago I read a tediously written sci-fi book set several centuries hence when humans had devised methods of living for hundreds of years. (I‘ve forgotten the title or author’s name, although I remember my 25-year-old computer geek son was a fan.) Two things I do recall were the desperate ennui caused by extreme longevity, as well as the absolute lack of any oaths, curses or profanities in the dialogue - something unheard of in an adult novels printed in the last half century. The author’s implication was that swearing had long ago run its course, had lost all power it might have once might have had to shock, and had therefore, like the eyes of a cave bat, stopped being used. Could this happen?

Depending on one’s nationality, curses derive from sex, religion, and bodily elimination. With the sex act today having become the equivalent of a peck on the cheek a century ago, with religion threatened with extinction, and with scatology having become commonplace on TV, in the movies and at the medical and geriatric facilities where a growing number of us work, live, or visit, the words that took their shocking power from these themes become ever less shocking.

Diminishing profanity’s power further, is a ubiquity verging on the commonplace. Virtually any of the HBO-originating TV shows that win all the awards – The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Generation Kill, etc. – is chock-a-block with shits, pisses, fucks, cunts, cocksuckers and their various variations. Most PG movies have at least one fuck. PG-14s are guaranteed to be laced with swearing. Popular music, with its origins in the black demimonde, has been pushing back the bad-language barriers for decades, but now has an established genre – rap/hiphop – which revels in the world of whores, drug dealers and petty thuggery without euphemism.

Mainstream network TV, newspapers and magazines may not have become infused with profanity yet, but inroads are being made. Today: pissed-off, ass, bullshit and son-of-a-bitch; tomorrow the rest. It is sort of quaint to watch Sopranos reruns on A&E with all of Tony’s fucks redubbed into “fricks”. Who are they doing this for?

(I imagine a spoof of A&E’s frickification of the Sopranos in which stilted Edwardian English is dubbed in alongside the New Jersey lingo. Viz: “Hey, Tone, whaddya want we should do wid duh guy?” “You should dispatch him with haste, my man. Godspeed!”)

I personally do not think that profanity will disappear. The cathartic frisson experienced when using impolite language makes it fun to swear - and not just for teenaged boys or construction workers. I suspect, however, that with the mainstreaming of the traditional Anglo-Saxon epithets, the swearwords may need to re-brand themselves to offend the new sacred cows. And when I say sacred cows, I speak of course of the avatars of political correctness whose creed, doctrine and moral code have, in the past two decades, enveloped western society like a wet blanket.

We’re already starting to see the beginnings of this re-branding. Nigger, for example, has become the “N-word,” something so horrible it dare not be spoken, even by way of quotation, by the gentle liberal souls who, these days, even uncomfortable with “black.”

(These are the same wets who inflicted “African-American” or the even more excruciating “persons of colour” on the living language. Meanwhile, the aforementioned rappers use the dreaded N-word with impunity in describing themselves or addressing one another. The wets somehow sanction this, as they turn a blind eye to the crime and the – gasp – sexism that informs the niggah-gansta-‘ho ethos.)

And it always seemed a little incongruous that on a show like Deadwood, set in a lawless late 19th Century gold-rush town, everyone was using the worst curses available to its early 21st Century writers. And yet the word “nigger” - which would have been in almost polite usage in 1890 – goes unuttered even by the bad guys who want to run the negro blacksmiths out of town.

Similarly shunned by a California dream factory otherwise fluent in the fuck patois is “faggot.” I’m at a bit of loss to understand this proscription, considering the liberal use of “cocksucker,” which would seem both synonymous and more profane. Perhaps the latter is deemed to have passed into the realm of generic obscenity – somewhat like the British epithet “sod,” which presumably derives from “sodomite,” although is scarcely used today with that in mind. Faggot, hitherto not really a swearword, is one of those terms associated with the dinosaurs who believe homosexuality to be unhealthy, unnatural and/or immoral. Such a position is clearly heresy, so “faggot” has become one of those newly blasphemous terms.

How the rest of the post-modern lexicon will develop is anyone’s guess. Perhaps there will be blasphemous reaction to quasi-religious zeal of the environmentals. In my research on the Third Crusade for Ted Byfield’s Christian history series, I learned that Richard the Lionheart, a rough, ready, and ribald warrior, liked to shock his effete ally and erstwhile friend Philip II of France by swearing oaths on Jesus’ body parts. Perhaps this practice might be adapted to the prophets of environmentalism. "Al Gore’s balls!" has a nice ring.

The feminist faith has already had its effect in the area of bad language. “Bitch,” I am informed by my middle daughter, is now “a swear.” I remember when it was merely derogatory – on a par with calling a man a “swine.” Both “prostitute” and “whore” show the promise of being promoted to the rank of obscenity as the feminist forces at work in the media and the schools promote the “sex trade worker” formulation (hookers having become saints in the feminist pantheon). Supposedly “misogynistic” terms like “the wife” or the “little woman” or the “weaker sex” also show the promise of assuming profane status. Just how such terms could be incorporated into rollicking patter of tomorrow’s construction site, however, is anyone’s guess. Maybe the “cunt-hair” system of measurement will morph into the “lesbian’s whisker.”

If any of you out there in the ether have any thoughts on how the vulgar vocabulary may evolve over the next generation or two, please drop me an email.

* * *

Further to the last posting, my Quebeckian co-worker Heric did in fact show up again, two weeks after reactivating an old back injury. Although a doctor had recommended he get a shoe implant to accommodate a crooked spine, Heric could not afford such a thing, but felt he was sufficiently recovered to go back to work. “I ‘ave to make some mon-ee,” he told me. Unhappily, any sympathy Brian had once had for Heric was exhausted, and he laid Heric off. “It ‘as been a shitty year,” he told me before he left the site for good.

Indeed, he has now been laid off from two jobs, has racked up a sizeable debt, has suffered at least three injuries, and recently heard from his girlfriend in Levis that she intends to leave him.

“Maybe the next year will be better,” I offered.

“Yeah, it’s my birt-day, a couple of weeks. I’ll be tirty-six years. Maybe dat’ll be better dan tirty-five.”

We shook hands, I told him I’d enjoyed working with him, and I got his phone number, promising I’d let him know if I heard of any work. It would be nice if I could find him another job. I like the guy and feel that he could do well in a friendlier environment that the one he’s leaving.

As predicted, Heric’s initial departure for his injury two weeks earlier removed my shit umbrella. No longer would Heric, the supposed “carpenter” and thus my supposed mentor, be getting dumped on by Brian for jobs done too slowly or ineptly. Now it was just me. And although I have yet to suffer any of the humiliating dressings-down that were inflicted on poor Heric, there has been some friction, some sarcasm, and a couple of near fights arising from my sluggishness or my failure to fully understand Brian’s inarticulately imparted instructions. I take solace in the fact that I am learning carpentry from someone who, despite a lack of teaching skills, knows carpentry. So far, I have sucked it up. And there is some satisfaction in contributing to the erection of a 10,000-square-foot building that, as can be seen from the photo below, is starting to look like something.