Expletives and blasphemy: as with pungent seasonings, easy does it

Is the profanity you're about to use the most effective way to get your point across?

I used to write a lot for Medium. I had not revisited my archive there for a long time, but I did so just now, and there are some great pieces there.

This one has a few details that date it, but the overall point is not bound by the particulars of a moment.

So, dear Precipice subscribers and readers, allow me to share some thoughts from five years ago on taking the express train to the bad-word zone:

A well-placed touch of potty-mouth phraseology has a singularly upside-the-head effect on those on the receiving end of a printed or spoken message. “Well-placed” is the operative term here. The ability to maximize a bad word’s impact is squandered if one has a track record of gratuitous indulgence in blush-inducing rhetoric.

Profanity has gone from being a cultural harbinger to the linguistic equivalent of germs in a supermarket. It’s an inevitable aspect of discourse in post-America.

It didn’t so evolve in a vacuum, but a look at what else has coarsened over the last half-century would be too big a digression for the scope of this discussion. Let the slippery slope from dormitory curfews to campus sex weeks serve as shorthand for the overall trend.

It’s true that since I’ve taken the matter of faith more seriously my own outbursts of verbal sewage are less frequent, but certain triggers, such as autocorrect, boorish driver behavior, or the top of my head making unexpected contact with the corner of a cabinet door can unleash a barrage I’m grateful my mother will never have the chance to hear.

There was a time, during the eight-year era in our nation that concluded in 2016, when certain Supreme Court decisions, executive-branch agency regulations, and pronouncements by particular public figures would have me screaming white-hot invective at my computer or television screen, or perhaps subjecting my poor sister to it via telephone ambushes.

A combination of the above-mentioned deepening faith walk, and the metastasizing outlandishness of post-America’s political and cultural scene since then has had a tempering effect on my language. I’m more inclined to shake my head in resignation than to cuss now when I encounter some fresh effrontery.

We now have a chief executive markedly different from the one whose name is associated with the eight-year period preceding the present one, but their most noteworthy common trait is the ability to plunge us into uncharted waters daily, and thereby exacerbate the polarization that’s characterized our national life for some time.

The two main sides that have shaped up as our current president’s penchant for controversy has assumed constant front-burner status — his zealots and those who hate him — have each employed a lot of profanity and don’t seem to be congnizant of how much they’ve diminished its effectiveness.

The zealots, including some pundits who had already established themselves as upper-tier, trot out the f-bombs and four-letter references to digestive biproducts in order to cop an attitude. Television show hosts and columnists with law and military pedigrees, in an effort to relate to the president’s everyman base, engage in faux virility and cleverness in their social-media contributions. They even accuse those who would have anything disparaging to say about crude outbursts of being useless in the fight for the nation’s soul.

The president’s haters, of course, so express themselves out of blind rage, much like I do when banging my head on a cabinet door. To exist in a reality that includes his holding the office he does is the equivalent of being immersed in hot oil for them. It’s a primal reaction to a set of circumstances they can’t stand.

One interesting aspect of this is that the zealots are inclined to keep their lobbing of bad words out of their programs and columns, reserving them for social-media expression. The haters, by contrast, let fly with all manner of colorful formulations on network television.

You will notice that the venues known for forthright defense of what used to be recognized as conservatism, and the forthright declaration of misgivings about the current president, are relatively free of such verbiage. It gives them — us — no claim to moral superiority, just a strong sense that there’s not much persuasion power in going that route.

Politics, is, of course, far from the only realm in which potty-mouth expression is ubiquitous. We all have Facebook friends whose gripes about everything from customer service to sports to dating disappointments are couched in language indicating that not much thought was given to whether a given term was the most effective for what they were saying.

Even exuberant endorsements of the good things in life are subject to expeletives’ elevation to go-to status.

I used to drive some Uber, and I recall, while working a nearby university town, taking a carload of well-groomed, fresh-smelling, comparatively well-behaved sorority girls to the tailgate fields for a home football game one Saturday afternoon. We passed a convenience store the parking lot of which hosted a barbecue stand on game days, and the discussion turned to the ribs, pulled pork and brisket offered there.

“Have you ever tried it?” asked one girl.

“No, but I hear it’s fucking great,” replied another.

Now, I suppose that got the message across effectively for the conversational environment in which it was offered, but would not a little more thought have helped those listening get a sense of the stand’s fare’s particular appeal?

This, whether found in the political realm, in social-media pesonal-life venting, or ebullient reportage about good barbecue, is perhaps the most lamentable aspect of the mainstreaming of bad words. They make our imaginations atrophy. Our vocabularies shrink. Our ability to spot and savor an exquisite turn of phrase fades.

Given profanity’s omnipresence, I’m inclined to find some other term whenever I’m tempted to go to it. It’s not that I’m a prude. I’m just hoping against hope that real humanity can flourish in this world again, and that entails moment-by-moment choices about the way I communicate.

At the most, an easy-does-it approach is advisable — that is, if one values actual flavor in one’s experience of life. As with the ingredients in a good barbecue rub, proportion is everything.