STAWAR: There’s no swearing off

By TERRY STAWAR
Local Columnist

May 01, 2008 05:59 pm

— My wife Diane and I were walking out of church last week when we saw something scrawled in chalk on the parking lot. The words were mildly offensive references to anatomical parts, but certainly nothing worse than you might hear any night on television.
For something calculated to shock, we were surprised about how tame the profanity seemed. If they had really wanted to upset us, they could have written “adjustable rate mortgage,” “gasoline prices,” “clogged septic tank,” or “income taxes.”
Let’s face it, one of the major occupations of childhood is to shock us parents. Since it means they want our attention, at least it’s better than that indifferent contempt characteristic of adolescence. Children are impressed by the power of off-color language. I was amazed at the arbitrary nature of the whole thing. A word could be perfectly acceptable, but change only a few letters and suddenly it was forbidden or even illegal. I could never fathom how the word “bloody” could be a curse word in England, but not here.
I remember getting into trouble in the fifth grade when some of us boys, during recess, developed a code in which we chose a few everyday words to stand in for common curse words. Our teacher, Mr. Benway, had little patience when he would be lecturing and suddenly we would burst into idiotic laughter for no apparent reason. All in all it was a pretty self-destructive joke, since none of us could give a satisfactory answer when he would angrily ask what was so darn funny. Worse of all, it couldn't be undone. We involuntarily snickered for months at certain phrases, much to Mr. Benway’s mounting annoyance.
It’s not hard to see how kids learn to swear. I can’t ever use any of the Polish words I know in polite company, since I learned them from the times my father would hit his thumb with a hammer. Once when our oldest son was about 7, he was under the dining room table retrieving the green peas that he would always accidentally drop on the floor, so that he wouldn’t have to eat them. Forgetting himself, our son tried to stand up, bumping his head and letting loose with some unfortunately familiar expletives that immediately had Diane nodding at me in disapproval.
Kids are terrible suckers for what is euphemistically referred to as bathroom humor. It only takes one prohibited word (poop) to make a 5-year-old roll on the floor. And this insight isn’t lost on professional humorists, as Pulitzer winning columnist Dave “Booger” Barry well knows.
Many professional comedians look down on performers who routinely use “blue material.” Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Cosby and others who “work clean” believe using such jokes is cheating. English comedian Ricky Blue says that dirty jokes are a great metaphor for the dilemma of comedy. To make people laugh you have to break taboos and yet, by breaking those taboos, you risk offending them.
An Associated Press poll found that three-fourths of Americans report that they encounter other people swearing several times a week and two-thirds admitted to their own swearing. Two-thirds also said that they thought people swear more now than they did in the past and inhibitions about swearing in front of women and children no longer seem to hold. A two-thirds majority of Americans furthermore claim all this swearing bothers them.
Columnist Rick Hutzell from the Maryland Gazette writes that we “swim in a sea of profanity” today. According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, profanity is used every 6 minutes on network television and every 3 minutes in movies.
So why is swearing so prevalent, despite thousands of years of religious, cultural, and legal prohibitions? According to Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, it may be because profanity serves so many functions. People use it to get attention, provoke laughter, and encourage negative feelings in others. Swearing can also be used to abuse, intimidate, or insult others. It may be a way to bond with peers, give special emphasis to something, or serve as an emotional outlet.
Over 100 years ago, Professor G.T.W. Patrick from the University of Iowa wrote a treatise on swearing for the Psychological Review. He concluded that profanity is the “accompaniment of anger,” when we are “provoked, annoyed or surprised by hurt.” He likened it to the snarling and growling of animals when they are fighting.
A 2007 study in England found that banning workplace profanity could have negative effects on employee morale and motivation. In some situations it fostered solidarity and relieved feelings of frustration and stress. In America, however, profanity use can be considered a feature of a “hostile work environment” and serve as grounds for a sexual harassment complaint.
A Colorado appeals court ruled that employees could be fired and denied unemployment benefits, if they cussed at coworkers, so long as businesses communicated what were “standards of acceptable behavior” to their employees. I naively thought that “no swearing at coworkers” was one of those “goes without saying” work rules, like “don't spit on the customers,” “don't be stupid” and “nudity is not an option.”
Many fear that this increase in public profanity is symptomatic of a greater ill — the general loss of courtesy and subsequent unraveling of the social fabric. Writing in the University Wire, Jack Daniels (great name) says that one's use of speech is a “huge indicator of the character of a person.”
Many schools have responded with zero-tolerance swearing policies. Southport High School in Indianapolis, for example, adopted a cuss control policy several years ago and immediately noticed a significant reduction in fighting. This is much like New York City's “broken windows approach” to crime prevention, in which a severe crack-down on petty violations (like throwing rocks or jumping over subway turnstiles) results in significant reductions in major crime.
So maybe we should all be more concerned about all this swearing, since it could just be the slippery slope that leads to even further gosh darn incivility.
Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D. lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring in Jeffersonville. Contact him at tstawar@lifespr.com or 812-206-1234.

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