About Swearing

Imagine my surprise while reading a book on the life of a New Yorker Magazine proofreader to come across a chapter titled:

"Chapter 9. F*ck This Sh*t” (Actual title, not censored)
(From: Mary Norris. Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.)

It was a whole chapter on profanity. Here's the opening paragraph (warning: not censored)

HAS THE CASUAL USE OF profanity in English reached a high tide? That’s a rhetorical question, but I’m going to answer it anyway: Fuck yeah.
(From: Mary Norris. Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.)

One of the great difficulties of

a) growing up in a fundamentalist Baptist Church;
b) working in radio and
c) having a 30-year career as a preacher

is that the ability to swear in many places is frowned upon. I remember a book that I got at a Baptist Revival in the early-60s that frowned (understatement) on swearing. They went so far as to say that even use of the soft words (darn, heck, and shoot, for example) was forbidden because everyone knew that they really meant something else. To use even these was part of the highway to Hell. (Capitalized, therefore indicating a place and not a swear word.)

This resulted in the fear of swearing- and when hearing a swear word- feeling ashamed for having heard it. I would take a certain guilty pleasure in church when a hymn used the word Hell. Saying a forbidden word, in church, was perhaps my entry into the life of degradation Harold Hill warned of in River City's pool hall.

I managed to stay mostly pure during my first year at college. I probably picked up an occasional damn or hell, but that was about it. Then came my real slide into damnation. During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years I worked in a local factory. The high school locker rooms were mild in comparison. I heard words in combinations I had never thought would make any sense. Like they say, when in Rome...

It was actually liberating! I discovered the joy of letting words fly. I didn't get to the level of sophistication of a couple of my co-workers who would pepper every sentence with one of the bigger words, like the two Mary Norris censored in her chapter title. I was downhill slip-sliding away!

It was no time at all until my favorite word was "Shit." (Sidenote: I still have problems writing that as my own word, not that of author Norris! Some shame dies hard.) This was, of course, the late 60s when we had that wonderful, gross as hell phrase to imagine:

Get your shit together!
(Hey, this is kind of fun.)

I know what Mary Norris means when she talks about going with friends

to see the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid over and over, and never failed to laugh at the scene when Robert Redford admits to Paul Newman that he can’t swim, but, to escape their trackers, he jumps off the cliff into the river anyway, bellowing “SHHHHHIIIIIIIIITTTT” on the way down.”
(From: Mary Norris. Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.)

I could ramble on about this, of course. I don't have any embarrassing stories that I remember. Perhaps the most difficult time was right after I was discharged from my alcohol treatment program. As one might expect in that environment the language is not what I normally heard on Sunday morning at church. Sometime in the first few months sober my wife and I were relaxing with our best friends (who were church members) and some topic or another came up. Without a moment's hesitation Mary Norris's chapter title came out.

Okay. Maybe I was a little embarrassed at that moment. But, as I quickly added,

Now you see why I don't ad lib anything in worship.

So, what's the purpose of this essay? Well, I'm not sure. Maybe the young fundamentalist ghost is getting some prurient interest in doing something "obscene" in public? Maybe the retired pastor is saying that he knows these words? Maybe I just wanted to say that these words, used in the right place and time have an important place in our language. I remember reading a few years ago that letting go with a good string of profanities when you hit your thumb with a hammer actually reduces the amount and length of the pain.

I didn't want to ask how they ethically studied that.

And of course, it's what came to mind and felt like fun to share.

Great Writing

It always amazes me, although I know it shouldn't be such a surprise, that I can often tell I'm reading a great book from the very beginning. There's something about the language and flow that grabs hold of me and won't let go.

I AM A SPY, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess. At other times, when I reflect on how I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess. But in the month when this confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear.

So begins the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. It isn't often I will comment on a book I have barely started, but this one was an instant and powerful hook. (Well, doh, it is this year's Pulitzer Prize winner!)

Every literature professor and critic knows the way to build a story. Very few writers can do it masterfully. For example there is a slow release of information, unveiled bit by bit. A line piques your curiosity wondering what the connection is. A hint of few words about "my father" plants a seed- or is it a time bomb- that you are on guard to find out.

But above all, there is the language and the ability to tell you more in a few words than I could tell you in a whole chapter (or a whole sermon, for that matter.) Here are three that grabbed me and wouldn't let me go in the first chapter:

“Amid short tempers, Claude stayed cool, having lived here so long he barely perspired in the tropical humidity. He could sneak up on you in the dark, but he could never be invisible ”

“I finished the whiskey, then drove the General home through a storm, the amniotic water bursting over the city a hint of the forthcoming season.”

“We were smoking a final cigarette at the mouth of the dank, dripping alley that was the beer garden’s exit when a trio of hydrocephalic marines stumbled out of the vaginal darkness. ”

All excerpts From:

Viet Thanh Nguyen. “The Sympathizer.”

This is clearly a book to savor, rich in language, style, substance and story. It is clearly not a book to be taken lightly. I am already aware that there is going to be much to learn and experience about the human condition in this book. But I must not rush through it. It must be read with caution of its power and at a pace which allows it to become part of me.

As a writer such books make me cringe at my own verbosity here or in any of my sermons over the years. They also force me to look at the world around me in different ways than I may ever have before. This is the kind of book that affirms for me that fiction can be far more powerful in telling the truth than many a set of facts. Like any great book this one may have been conceived in the mind of the writer, but it is not false or fake.

Read, listen, and learn.

Changing the Laguage

This came across my Facebook feed today about language and addiction. It was in the Science of Us section of New York Magazine online.

Think of the words and phrases we use to describe drug and alcohol addiction: “clean and sober,” “addicts,” “junkies.” It’s a vocabulary loaded with moralistic connotations. This isn’t good, argue the authors of a new editorial in the journal Substance Abuse, because the use of those terms can inadvertently lay the blame solely on the behavior of the person with the drug or alcohol addiction. And when people struggling with addiction internalize that attitude, it can undermine recovery.
-Link

My first thought was it reminded me of language usage 30 years ago as the AIDS epidemic was just ramping up and becoming really scary. The general phrase "AIDS victims" was often used at first. Then the AIDS activists decided that gave a bad morale to the individuals with HIV/AIDS. From then on it became "People with AIDS" or PWAs. It worked so well that I had to stop for a moment to even remember what we used before PWA. It also changed the face of AIDS in the country, most prominently for the people with AIDS themselves.

Victims is not what we want to make people with a disease feel like. That can engender self-pity, ongoing victimization,hopelessness.

I then put the two thoughts together in my head and realized the power of that insight. Dirty -vs.- clean? Drunks and junkies -vs.- people with addiction? The article even goes on to talk about the results of urine drug screens. For many years the phrase has been, a "dirty urine." (As if there is such a thing as "clean urine?") It is the difference language places on things. Dirty is bad- inherently bad. It is a negative state of being.

We have been working for years to change the metaphors of addiction language. We have been struggling to get beyond the ancient and incorrect moral judgements that we have often put on addiction and alcoholism. We have been wrestling with the greater society as well as the medical field itself to see the disease as real and not just some immorality.

Maybe part of it can become the language we decide to use. Even moving from a pathology to a healing language can help.

Here's a quote from another section of the editorial itself:

Recovery-oriented language refocuses the lens from pathology and suffering to resilience and healing. Recovery-oriented language also changes the discussion from one rooted in notions of one-time, acute treatments or interventions to one that appreciates the long-term modalities and strategies needed to sustain recovery.
-Link