Warning: this text contains saucy and inappropriate language.
I am no prude. I really don't curse much, but I've always been a sincere admirer of a really well-turned obscenity. I ride a shuttle van home from work, and when it's just the driver and me alone, the air fairly turns blue.
"Obscenity" is such a big field, especially when it refers to language. I know that philologists have tried to break it down into categories: body parts, sex, bathroom terminology, religion/blasphemy, insults to family members . . . . It's all good.
And I love languages, and along the way I have collected characteristic colorful expressions. One of the few Finnish words I know is a bathroom word. I know a little Polish, including two bathroom words and the all-purpose Polish obscenity, "cholera" (imagine how serious the illness was throughout central and eastern Europe for the word to become an obscenity!). Russians don't care about body parts or bathroom words - for them, it's clinical terminology - but there's a really juicy word referring to one's mother that is very all-purpose. I only know two Hungarian expressions; both are obscene, and both refer to sex, and one of them crosses over into bestiality. My French is pretty good, but French obscenity is a little on the drab side: – bathroom bathroom bathroom / sex sex sex. I know some dandy Spanish obscenities, mostly involving marital infidelity. Arabic is full of zesty combinations of all of the above: my favorite combines religion, mother, body parts, and sex. (When I was in Morocco I was given a list of English words to avoid, because they sounded too much like Arabic obscenities. It was a long list. My favorite is the name "Howie." If you want to know what it means: well, Howie Mandel has two of them.)
I bring this up because I have lived long enough to watch language on TV change. In my youth, you couldn't say "hell" or "damn." Horrors! Lucy Ricardo couldn't be "pregnant" in the 1950s, so they came up with "expectant." Things began to move forward in the 70s or so. A few words for body parts crept into common TV parlance. (On an early episode of "The Simpsons," probably circa 1991, Bart uses the word 'butt' while talking to a TV reporter, and then says, "Can I say 'butt' on TV?" The reporter replies smoothly: "On this network you can.") Descriptive language and euphemisms have always been popular. How long ago was Bob Eubanks calling sex 'whoopie'? Late 1960s, I think.
And ever since British TV entered the United States, we've been aware that Europeans were more frank and open than we are. Partner and I are big fans of the BBC/Irish show "Father Ted," which uses 'arse' frequently, and which introduced me to my very favorite euphemistic obscenity, 'feck' (as in "Are you out of your fecking mind, Dougal?").
Well, imagine my surprise when I heard Charlie Sheen use the word 'ballsack' on "Two and a Half Men" the other night. Also, there's a new cartoon show called "Adventure Time"," on which I heard a character use the word 'superballs' in a derogatory sense (as in "That guy is really superballs"); they also had a fantasy sequence in which the two main characters were farting on a microwave oven they'd brought to life earlier. And laughing about it.
And a note about last night's premiere of the show that dares not speak its name, "$#*! My Dad Says." (Partner had to explain the symbology of the title to me. In case you don't get it: $ = "S," # = "H," et cetera. Apparently, however, $#*! is pronounced 'bleep.') The show is mildly amusing, and they walk right up to the risky-language boundary, but then they back away again.
No matter what you think about it, times are changing. It's all for the best, I think. When you watch a show like "The Sopranos," you need to understand how the characters speak. Editing them, bowdlerizing them, would ruin the show. Listening to Tony and Silvio and Paulie talk is like snorting smelling salts right out of the bottle: it's very bracing.
I'm in favor of realism. People on TV should talk the way people really talk, swearing and all.
I know there's always the issue of children. Listen, I learned to swear just fine on my own without TV's help. Also, every show on TV these days is plastered over with warning labels: L, D, V, etc. You just can't dump the kid in front of the TV anymore. Really, you never could. You really need to pay attention to what he's watching.
Having said that: Hey, you had a kid. Take care of him. If you don't want him to learn to swear, you'd better get to work on that.
And good luck. Trust me, he'll learn how, one way or another. I did.
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