Update!

The Education of an Utterance

By Joe Prebich, 9-20-05

With so much response to my last post, �How I Almost Got Arrested Last Night� I thought that this would be the perfect follow-up on the subject of profanity. In today's New York Times there is an article so fitting I couldn't have planned it better myself.

The piece called, "Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore" by Natalie Angier, takes an in-depth look into the history of swearing and profane words, trying to get to the bottom of why these words offend us and what they REALLY mean.

Here is an excerpt from the article:
{Incensed by what it sees as a virtual pandemic of verbal vulgarity issuing from the diverse likes of Howard Stern, Bono of U2 and Robert Novak, the United States Senate is poised to consider a bill that would sharply increase the penalty for obscenity on the air...[jumping a few paragraphs]....literary giants have always constructed their art on its spine.

"The Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson peppered his plays with fackings and "peremptorie Asses," and Shakespeare could hardly quill a stanza without inserting profanities of the day like "zounds" or "sblood" - offensive contractions of "God's wounds" and "God's blood" - or some wondrous sexual pun.

The title "Much Ado About Nothing," Dr. McWhorter said, is a word play on "Much Ado About an O Thing," the O thing being a reference to female genitalia.

Even the quintessential Good Book abounds in naughty passages like the men in II Kings 18:27 who, as the comparatively tame King James translation puts it, "eat their own dung, and drink their own piss."

In fact, said Guy Deutscher, a linguist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and the author of "The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention," the earliest writings, which date from 5,000 years ago, include their share of off-color descriptions of the human form and its ever-colorful functions. And the written record is merely a reflection of an oral tradition that Dr. Deutscher and many other psychologists and evolutionary linguists suspect dates from the rise of the human larynx, if not before.}

Get the rest of the article here.

This piece also perfectly coincides with a recent article by satirist who takes shots at the government's recent attempt, through the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, to further restrict what can be said in radio and television. Keillor’s solution to these proposed restrictions: �Let’s hand out fines to politicians�.

If we were to take Keillor’s advice, vice-president Cheney would most likely be taking out a mortgage to pay off the fine he would have recieved from when he told Sen. Patrick Leahy to "fuck himself".

And wouldn't you know it those very words came back to him when a man in Mississippi, who had just visited the wreckage of his house destroyed by Katrina, interrupted Cheney's press conference by yelling, "Go fuck yourself Mr. Cheney." But not everyone at the conference reported the outburst, some edited it out. Daily Kos has a great post on this, along with the video of the conference.

With such blatant hypocrisy coming out of our pillars of government; where they want to control the voices of the people, but remain above their own standard, Angier's article has found itself a niche where instead of knee-jerk reactions, we are focred to look logically at swearing for what it really is.

Read Angier’s article here.

Read my post, �How I Almost Got Arrested Last Night�

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