My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, reviews books on Tweeter, and the other day she reviewed a novel, which she’d checked out of the library, entitled “Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta”. What struck me about this book – which I did not read because it’s a novel which has Deep Thoughts, and I’m only interested in Shallow Thoughts, because I’m old and impatient and lazy – was its embrace of profanity in the title, which I can assure you, he says in an aggrieved tone, would never have appeared in the library when I was a boy. The times, as they say, have changed.
Profanity fascinates me. My parents did not swear, to the best of my knowledge, and I had to learn it on the street, if by “the street” you mean “the hallway of my high school”. And once I learned, I embraced it with an enthusiasm that I tend to reserve for pumpkin pie and early Springsteen. SWMBT is the same way. And since we don’t have children, we’ve never actually learned how to stop – our home sounds something like the Algonquin Round Table as populated by a particularly disrespectful collection of longshoremen. And this turns out to be a problem, when in the presence of the children of other people; I’m assuming that most of our friends’ children learned to swear on the early side, from us.
So I try not to swear around the young ‘uns, especially when they seem to be listening especially closely. And I don’t swear in my songs, and I try very hard not to swear on stage. I mean, my act is already not really for children, with the unreliable narrators and the graduate-level wordplay and the topics that do not overlap with typical childhood interests. But all that means is that they’ll bored and their parents will be interested, as opposed to them hanging on my every profanity and their parents covering their ears. And, typically, our little corner of the music world is pretty dainty anyway when it comes to swearing – we’ll sing about murder and assault and war and racial and and sexual violence, but that’s as far as we’ll go. In fact, just the other day I was at a show where one of the performers felt obligated to consult the host about whether she could sing a curse as part of the lyric to her song. So on stage, I’m keeping it clean.
As opposed to the rest of my life, and, frankly, the rest of the world around me. George Carlin’s seven words you couldn’t say are gasping and covering their private parts on broadcast television, thanks to the FCC, but who watches broadcast television anymore? All the good stuff, including the profanity, is streaming or on cable. And why not? We’re surrounded by swearing in real life – not swearing on television is like having separate twin beds in 60’s sitcoms.
Sure, there are still people who are offended by it; there are probably entire US states which get their panties in a twist whenever someone tees up a meaty swear word. I, on the other hand, welcome our blasphemy overlords. As soon as I’ve taken off my folk suit, I’m cursing like a sailor. And to those folks who say that overuse blunts its impact, I ask you: does the word “the” mean anything different today than it meant yesterday, now that I’ve used it another nine million times? I didn’t think so. Profanity means something, and I mean it every time I say it. Anger is my marble, and profanity is my chisel, and while it might not make the sort of dent I wish it did, it’s enough of a dent for me.