Dirty words: if you can't say something nice, go right ahead.

AuthorCurrie-Knight, Kevin
PositionBooks - Michael Adams' "In Praise of Profanity" - Book review

I CAME OF AGE in the era of gangsta rap. As a kid, I was baffled by the "clean" versions of songs--the radio edits of Eazy-E's "Eazy Duz It" and Dr. Dre's "Nothin' But a G Thang"--which were basically just the "dirty" versions with the expletives bleeped out. I certainly knew exactly what words were being removed. Why, I wondered, was the bleeping sufficient to make the song radio-friendly?

My parents raised me not to use "bad" language, but late in elementary school my friends and I learned both how to curse and how to turn off our cursing when grown-ups were around. Just as I wasn't supposed to curse around adults, I was, in some sense, expected to curse around my friends.

Such experiences are explained in Michael Adams' In Praise of Profanity. The book's argument is not that we should use more profanity. It's that profanity evolved within the spontaneous order we call language to perform certain functions. Eliminate profanity and you'll eliminate those functions, making language less powerful.

TO TALK ABOUT the ins and outs and shoulds and shouldn'ts of profanity, we need to distinguish it from slang, obscenity, or just plain coarse language. Adams, a linguistic historian at Indiana University Bloomington, rejects the idea that profanity is inherent in certain words. The profanity of any particular word depends on contextual factors, including the norms of the group where the word is uttered. "Fuck" can be profane ("Go fuck yourself!"), or it can simply be slang ("What the fucking fuck?"). "I'm sick of this shit!" might not be profane among one group of friends; "I'm about to drop a deuce!" would qualify among another, even though the sentence contains no profane words. As with any evolved social system, language's rules are context-dependent, and the rules about what differentiates profanity from slang or just bad manners is context-driven.

Within those contexts, profanity can perform vital functions. Anti-profanity crusaders (look up the No Cussing Club) argue that cursing makes you less articulate and that there are always words we could use in place of profane ones. Wanna bet? Profanity is expressive speech, and as such, synonyms are often imperfect substitutes. It is hard to imagine, for instance, a non-profane way to express that someone is a motherfucker. ("Dirty rascal" just doesn't do it.) When someone cuts off a lane of traffic, what clean alternative will have the same bite as "asshole"? Sometimes, the point of a sentence is...

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