Amid the Fray
I tasted soap once, and it was enough.
At a rather tender age, I must have sassed my mom. I don’t remember the crime, but I remember the punishment: Getting my mouth washed out with soap. It left an impression.
As we enter the Christmas season this year, I can’t help but think Santa Claus could do worse than leave a bar of soap in our nation’s collective stocking.
On the airwaves, from our comedians, from our politicians, even from our president, there are f-bombs galore. The same with many TV series and movies we stream. The minority leader of the U.S. Senate released a video message during the government shutdown that used the word as a point of emphasis, as if somehow the rest of his message was not enough.
Take the example of John Oliver. On his weekly HBO show he can do impressive reporting on such topics as public media and Medicare, but to listen to him, you must wade through a deluge of what now are quaintly called “obscenities.” The deluge doesn’t add anything to the reporting, but it seems to impart some sort of seal of authenticity on the content, and is usually rewarded with laughter and applause from the audience.
There is a coarsening of our public speech that is impacting all of us. One hears it on public transportation or phone conversations had in public. One hears it from parents talking to their children and children talking to their parents. It has become acceptable as mainstream discourse, a kind of linguistic punctuation point to communicate anger or enthusiasm or simply (WTF) astonishment.
This coarsening of our public discourse has seeped into our politics. When the president of the United States called a reporter he didn’t like “piggy,” the White House defended his insult as “frankness.”
Insults, whether on our children’s playgrounds or in social media postings or in the White House press room are not examples of frankness. They are simply insults inappropriate for any leader or gentleman.
The challenge, of course, is that one cannot simply mandate that everyone else stop using these words, these slurs and insults. And when one is swimming in a sea of verbal sewage, it is hard not to pick up the stink. I speak from uncomfortable experience, for I’ve found that the more I’m exposed to such language, the more I am likely to use it in moments of anger, enthusiasm or astonishment.
Last Lent, it was even one of my resolutions to dial back on what is even more quaintly called “cuss words.” It was a resolve I struggled with. But since it is increasingly difficult to avoid its usage by others, the solution most of us are left with is how to change our own speech.
That may mean recovering expressions of anger, enthusiasm or astonishment from an older, more genteel period. We could start a national movement to bring back “Holy cow,” or “Judas priest” (my dad’s favorite) or “golly” (my uncle’s). Even the use of the word “frickin” could be a transitional step back, as could be “shoot.”
We need a verbal equivalent of the “#@%&*!” that one finds on the comics page. In the movie “The Christmas Story,” Ralphie’s dad muttered a string of unintelligible syllables signifying his deep displeasure and was the funnier for it.
This Advent, as we barrel toward Christmas, let’s make an early resolution to dial back the potty mouth. If you don’t suffer from this disease, you are blessed. For the rest of us, well, good golly, what better time to start?
Greg Erlandson is an award-winning Catholic publisher, editor and journalist whose column appears monthly at OSV News.