John Robson: What We've Lost (Bonus Edition) — the ability to speak without swearing |
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John Robson: What We've Lost (Bonus Edition) — the ability to speak without swearing
We contracted potty-mouth by ditching the very notion of self-control
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The past 10 or 15 years have not been kind to Canada. Along with a decline in prosperity has come an erosion of the things that made our society great, a decline of what held us together and made us the envy of the world: things like resilience, friendship and service. In this series, National Post writers considered What We’ve Lost. Today — a bonus contribution from John Robson.
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To the National Post’s splendid “What we’ve lost” series I want to contribute a bar of soap. Which might seem trivial but it’s not just any bar of soap. It’s the one they used to wash your mouth out with for cussing in the wrong time and place.
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Trying to be the change I want to see, I avoid swear words in print and online, even reposts. But my father nicknamed teenage me “Foul-mouth Frank.” And while I literally never heard him cuss, I suspect he, too, was a reformed sinner.
Alas, I can’t write about it without examples. You can cuss, even the f-bomb (but no further), if you mash your thumb with a hammer. Or in an adult conversation about manners. Which crucially is not a loathsome habit confined to my stinking opponents. It’s everywhere.
I often cannot repost otherwise worthy observations because they’re smeared with dung or consist entirely of it. As I frequently observe about “BS,” cow poop is not an argument. And it’s not innocent to mistake it for one.
Even in my misspent youth a “Freak Brothers” comic where Fat Freddy reacts to some radio news with “F–k that s–t, man” struck me as the epitome of mental squalor. (As when a friend and fellow summer-job painter greeted a locked apartment-building storeroom with “Sh-tf–k!” only to turn and see a pretty woman regarding us with contempt. Justly.)
How times have changed. An obituary of musician “Country Joe” McDonald praised his “four-lettered rebuke to the Vietnam War that became an anthem for protesters and a highlight of the Woodstock music festival.” Surely odd since the hippie movement professed to renounce the rage built into “Amerika.”
What we've lost (1): Masculinity
What we've lost (2): Stigma
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I also read with mild bemusement, in grad school, that Republican Senator Eugene Millikin (CO 1941-57), regularly kept reporters from quoting him by using mild profanity. Today, Canada’s prime minister cheerfully talks publicly about central bankers fussing over wine during a fiscal crisis: “You know, tick tick tick. And he’s like, ‘Well have this one, but you know, the pinot grigio,’ and I’m like, ‘f***’.”
I’m like it’s like no coincidence that the potty-mouthed would also put self-indulgence above duty. But it’s hard to argue nowadays because we contracted potty-mouth by ditching the very notion of self-control. Including in child-rearing. My reference to mouth soap presumably raised eyebrows as the kind of brutality Dickens rightly lampooned. But look what happens if we never draw and enforce boundaries.
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READ THE ENTIRE WHAT WE’VE LOST SERIES
When I urged a prominent Canadian political scientist to stop F’ing everything on Twitter he hoisted the authenticity flag. And when I replied “A foul mouth proceeds from a foul mind as a false mouth proceeds from a false mind” he blocked me. Do what thou wilt, however vile.
Compared to Jeffrey Epstein, obscenity might seem trivial. It’s not. We all think we’d have joined William Wilberforce’s famous anti-slavery crusade, though statistically it’s highly unlikely. But what of his other cause, not famous nowadays because, well, Victorian: the reformation of manners?
He didn’t mean don’t use the wrong fork or fly in pyjamas. He meant don’t gamble or cheat on your wife. Your whole manner of living. But as Henry Hazlitt said, “Manners are minor morals.” Or not so minor if you cut loose in front of kids.
Or strangers. Someone hollering obscenities in the street frightens people, rightly, because people who can’t even hold their tongues in polite company (if any) are unlikely to restrain other, darker impulses. Just as you cannot run a marathon if you never even jog round the block.
Resisting temptation requires training. But nowadays it’s all hanging out including grotesque quantities of mental and moral flab. Thus that obituary also took a positive view of McDonald being both named and nicknamed for Joseph Stalin.
Speaking of Woodstock, the long and largely triumphant campaign to free us of our inhibitions assumed the opposite, that only by casting off social conventions could we flourish as human beings, humane, dignified and gentle. Instead everything went straight to “the other place.” It’s no coincidence.
Last summer, The Hollywood Reporter said “That’s It, The F-Word Is Officially Boring: Just go ahead and say it, nobody minds anymore. Trump cursing during an interview is merely the last gasp of our media culture depleting the f-word of it’s (sic) former power.” So along with punctuation, we’ve even lost the capacity to unleash rhetorical dynamite as needed. But mostly we’ve lost any sense of decency.
If someone says you drink too much and you claim you can stop any time, only to find you can’t get through one day sober, you have a problem, right? Which starts small, a mere tipple, but ends up wrecking your life. Well, try not swearing in public.
Then reach for that bar of soap.
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