Today we are going to deal with the media coverage of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, epithets and imprecations, nouns often lumped together by the Bluenose Generation as coarseness, crudeness, bawdiness, scatology or swearing. But roundheeled readers should stop smacking their lips and rubbing their hands because the deliberately shocking subject can be treated with decorum, in plain words, without the titillating examples of “dirty words.” (Titillating, from the Latin titillare, “to tickle,” is clean.)
If you want to fulminate about such prissiness about prurience in print, feel free to rattle your jowls, blow your stack and otherwise express your outrage with the typographical device to which cartoonists have resorted for generations: !#*&%@%!!!
The need for today’s review is the coverage given to the participial modifier employed with great frequency and immortalized on recordings of telephone conversations made by the F.B.I. as its shocked — shocked! — agents eavesdropped on Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor. His favorite intensifier was reproduced in many newspapers and Internet sites with dashes as “—-ing” or with asterisks as “****ing” and was substituted in broadcasts, telecasts and Netcasts as a word descriptive of the sound called bleep. The Wall Street Journal went almost all the way, using both the first letter and three dashes in the participle before “golden,” the word it modified.
Here’s how The Washington Post handled it (with italics mine): “The governor, whose alleged dishonesty was matched only by his profanity, was secretly recorded by federal investigators saying that the Senate seat is ‘a [expletive] valuable thing, you don’t just give it away for nothing.’ [Prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald, in his news conference Tuesday, thoughtfully replaced each of the governor’s obscenities with ‘bleep’ or ‘bleeping.’ ” But in trying not to use the same word twice, the writer used three words with related but different meanings and etymologies.
Profanity has to do with irreverence toward the sacred; the Latin fanum means “temple.” Profane language disrespects, desecrates and separates itself from religion. Heavy profanity borders on blasphemy, but a mild profanity is “damnation!” that can be made milder by the euphemism “darn.” The Commandment about taking the Lord’s name in vain is regularly violated by “fer Crissakes” or finessed by blurring the name of Jesus to an innocent “gee whiz.” Although the meaning has been stretched in our time to a general “abusive; contemptuous; degrading,” profanity still retains its religious origins, and profane has an antonym in “secular.”
Members of the Vocabulary Constabulary insist that a profanity is no obscenity. The adjective obscene, rooted in ancient words for “filth,” has a strong connotation of blatant or illicit sex: “immodest to an offensive degree; lewd; appealing to prurience” (the root of that word is “itching, as for intercourse”).
An obscenity referred to by taste-conscious news-media outlets as “the F-word,” avoiding a term used often in English since the 14th century, was long left out of dictionaries for commercial reasons but is now included and labeled “obscene” or “vulgar.” Although cable television has done much to erode the taboo of obscenities, our society’s disapproval has increased on racial and ethnic slurs, as they have been described as “the true obscenities.” But however you treat obscenity, it is not semantically a profanity. The distinction is worth preserving.
Expletive began as padding; a word or phrase to fill up a line, often an inoffensive oath like “by gum,” but has added the sense of an exclamation or outcry interjected for emphasis. It gained popularity during the Watergate unpleasantness as words were primly excised from transcripts of the Nixon tapes and the space filled with a bracketed “expletive deleted.”
“Vulgarism in language,” wrote Lord Chesterfield to his son in 1749, “is the . . . distinguishing characteristic of bad company and a bad education.” From vulgus, Latin for “the common people,” it meant “manners and language below the aristocratic standards of the well bred,” but in the decline of snootiness, the meaning changed to a harsher “crude; indecent; tasteless.” Examples are familiar one-syllable words in the field of scatology (Greek root skat, “dung”) describing disposal of bodily wastes, now most often expressed in a shout after stubbing your toe in the dark.
An epithet is a derogation or slur not as “dirty” as a vulgarism or as explosive as an expletive, with which it is often confused. Tagging an intellectual as an “egghead” or labeling a passionate partisan as a “nut case” is using an epithet, or mildly disparaging word. In “show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser,” sometimes used in the locker room, the last “loser” is an epithet.
Imprecation brings us full circle to religion. Based on the Latin precare, “to pray,” the noun imprecation — along with its synonym execration, which shares a root with “sacred” and has nothing to do with excrement — are curses, usually married to the verb “mutter,” calling down punishment from on high. These bookish terms of excessive condemnation are out of critical fashion, merely evoking the exclamation by Snoopy, the cartoon character from Peanuts, “Curse you, Red Baron!”
A bleep is a “squeak” — the echoic word for a high-pitched sound, especially one made by electronic equipment, lately embraced as a self-censoring word by Chicago prosecutors to avoid reading obscenities aloud in publicizing arrests. Our oral and instant messages are now heralded by the sound of the bleeper. Earliest use in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The New York Herald Tribune in 1953: “The bleeps of Geiger counters make ‘penny stocks’ on the country’s exchanges palpitate into investors’ bonanzas.” More sophisticated plays today have made investors bleeping furious.
William Safire, New York Times
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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/magazine/04wwln_safire-t.html
