There’s an old saying that you can’t trust a man who doesn’t take a drink. Well, I don’t trust anyone who never uses profanity. Don’t get me wrong, I understand profanity sometimes shows the lack of a good vocabulary.
Conversely, there are special times when a well-placed curse word is worth a hundred polite alternatives. Incidentally, I refuse to use "cuss" instead of curse. North of the Mason-Dixon Line it’s still a curse word. If you want to talk like a cowboy, move to the Southwest.
Profanity can positively cleanse the soul when used properly. A few well-directed profane epithets can sometimes substitute for violence. In lieu of punching out someone’s lights, perhaps calling him or her a ****** idiot may do the trick. Be advised there is no guarantee the other person will see it the same way and they may just punch your lights out.
Notice that by substituting asterisks in place of the profanity in the above paragraph, I am chickening out on my own policy. Sad to say, newspapers for the most part operate under the iron-clad rules of decorum. We are not allowed to curse in print. The whole idea is supposed to be that we are a family newspaper and therefore profanity has no place in our articles. We recoil in shock at the possibility one of our youngsters might come upon the profanity and be scarred for life. I would willingly trade that possibility if, in return, it meant that any youngster would actually take the time to read a newspaper. In fact, if a few profanities sprinkled throughout a newspaper would encourage a kid to read it, put me down in favor of the idea. We do a lot of things to protect our youth, but if you’ve ever passed a playground you know that, despite our best efforts, the kids have somehow learned all the curse words and invented a few new ones, too.
But I digress. Imagine how liberating it would have been if we were able to report that, when President Bush announced his tax cut would not cause deficits, "Mr. Bush is decidedly full of ****."
Getting back to my distrust of people who will not curse under any circumstance, these people will often resort to silly code words for the profanity. For instance, if someone double-parks you in, uttering "Oh sugar" just doesn’t convey the correct level of annoyance. Some folks act like it’s a worse sin to say the f-word than to do that same thing to their business partners or customers. The fear of such words is irrational.
The whole business of pretending profanity doesn’t exist engenders all kinds of hypocrisy. Goodness knows, hypocrisy has forced our politicians to pretend as if they would never stoop to using a good swear word now and then.
Practically the only thing that has made me proud of our vice president, Dick Cheney, is when he got angry at Sen. Pat Leahy and told him, on the floor of the Senate, to go "****" himself. When confronted in mock horror by the media, Cheney admitted what he said. The only thing that would have gained him my undying admiration is if he was honest enough to say, "and you can go **** yourselves, too."
Profanity has been a part of our history of discrimination against women in this country. It has always been understood that red-blooded males curse when they are not in the company of females. Women, it was thought, were above that. Actually, it was not really that women were of a higher order, it was just another phony double standard foisted on them by our male-dominated society.
Women, meanwhile, were dropping f-bombs all over the place over a cosmopolitan at lunch or in beauty shops all over America. I’m not sure, maybe it was Erica Jong or Camille Paglia, but the first time one of these well-known women publicly told men they were fill of "****" it all changed.
Here’s a major difference between our society and Muslims in the Middle East – no veils, lots of swearing, all very liberating. If an American woman had to walk several steps behind her husband in America, she would do so with her middle finger raised.
And that’s not a bad thing.
