On Giving The Ever Loving Hell In

(Fair warning:  This post, words and links, contains topically appropriate use of profanity.  I normally do not like to use this sort of language, but it is highly relevant to the topic, and dilutions like 'the b-word' are profoundly annoying.)

I have given this post a title that is a phrase as obtuse in its construction as the kluge of a topic on which I am presently set to writing.   There are two facets to today’s post, one of which grew out of the other.

 I very strongly considered titling the post “On giving the ever loving fuck in.”  There were two reasons – one was the magnitude of the revulsion I felt for the idea at hand (which I will discuss below), and the other was that I had been thinking a bit lately on the subject of profanity, its use, and its usefulness.

Source:  Oh, let's say that I scanned a cd cover...

I have a complex relationship with salty language.  On the one, boring, priggish hand, there is something unbecoming about swearing like a goddam sailor all the fucking time.  Ahem.  It smacks ungentlemanly and my admitted pretensions to propriety often preempt a good profane rant.  I am decidedly old-fashioned, and the popular understanding of “old-fashioned-ness” is very much tied up in a stereotypical grandmotherliness, or at least in oafish avuncularity.  Now, the rakish antique that is my idealisation of the anachronistic is far from avuncular, but one must keep up appearances.  The public wants pseudovictorian umbrage at profanity from its paragons of propriety, whether or not it is historically accurate.

On the other hand, bugger that.  Never in history has it been more universally improper to holler obscenities in public than it is now.   The modern eyes (and more appropriately, ears) hear words like ‘humbug,’ ‘bunkum,’ ‘poppycock,’ ‘balderdash,’ and ‘pants,’ and find them quaint and adorable.  And it is true:  in the modern day, these words are that to which we seem to turn when we are trying to avoid using one of the big 7… or 10?  That being the case, most assume that in their day, these words served this same function – inoffensive nonsense words that well dressed, moustachioed men employed to keep the fouler stuff out of the discussion and ensure no be-laced ladies fainted with an astonished ‘Well, I never!’ The reality, of course, is that these words were every bit profane in their heyday; they were salty language that men might use amongst themselves or in personal conversations, but were as proscribed from speeches or polite conversation as the worst of today’s popular music vocabulary obscenities.  (Sorry for that link.  This one is far better.)

The great trouble with profanity as a category is that in proscribing certain utterances as impolite and uncouth, we remove from our general usage what are perhaps our most expressive and powerful words.  And yet, and this is the real trouble, that power can only exist thanks to the proscription.  It is not a difficult gedankenexperiment – if the word ‘Wednesday’ were generally held to be the absolute height of filth in auditory form, prone to screeching children and fainting matrons, then exclaiming that you are absolutely Wednesday mad about something would have a certain thrust to it that other strong, but polite, words would not.  (The same goes for ‘Belgium.’)  Similarly, if ‘twat’ were the third month of the year, then, well, we would all just have to get used to dropping that profoundly ugly word in polite conversation (its transcendent awfulness aside).  It is because the words are shocking that they are effective – but this is old hat. 

The good stuff, as usual, is neurological.  As it so happens, when we monitor the brain of a garden variety human whilst they hear two sets of words – the perfectly polite, and those considered profane in that person’s community and era – the brain treats the two categories differently.  While the normal, polite language is processed through the language centres and parsed for semantics, syntax, context, and meaning, the profanity has the added bonus of eliciting response in the amygdalae – centres of emotion processing.  In a wonderful confluence of our biology and society, once a word has been deemed ‘over-powerful’ by society at large, our brain has the decency to reroute it as a direct expression of strong emotions.  Profanity can even mediate pain.  Convenient indeed, and all the more reason to swear like a sailor – provided that you mean it;  nothing ruins a good, strong effect like normalisation.  So it seems William F. Buckley had it right: if a word is considered by the general audience to be something of a strong sentence enhancer, then neurology suggests that you can convey your strong point best with a bit of goddam profanity.

(I have dispensed with discussing slurs in the above protraction.  As a white male, it is difficult for me to discuss the appropriateness of racial/ethnic/other slurs, as the punishment for having an opinion in this area usually involves being dragged behind a horse made of tweets for a week or so.  That said, I do not consider most slurs truly profane, as most of them have no objective meaning with respect to the individual.  ‘Bitch,’ for example, is a profanity – it comes with certain negative qualities that one presumes you assign to whomever you assign the label.  Most slurs, on the other hand, do not do this; ‘cracker,’ often applied to whites, may come with some racial stereotypes, but calling a honkey a cracker doesn’t attach to that howlie any particular set of personal attributes – it just makes you a jackass.)

So all this leaves the question, what is it in to which I am giving with such dramatic exasperation as to be tempted to litter my blog titles with profanity?   Stop delaying and get on with it, you say.  Fine, but I don’t like it and I’m not happy to say it…  I have much derided the balkanisation of modern society into ever shrinking empires of the individual; millions upon millions turning inward to self-aggrandisement and self-promotion.  I am certainly not innocent in this regard; you are reading a blog that I write for no reason! (ambiguous antecedent deliberate).  In light of this, it is very unpleasant for me to admit that I have bitten another e-bullet and decided to wallow a bit deeper in the mud.

Ok enough circumlocution.

I’ve gotten a goddam Twitter account.

[Shudders].

Several people have been trying to convince me to tweet for a while (many of them the same set that convinced me that this blog might be worth writing).  I have resisted valiantly until now, but with the creation of the blog, their arguments became more convincing – if one is going to be a prostitute one ought to be a well-supplied prostitute.

So I will be occasionally tweeting to announce new posts here and to share my thoughts, banal or otherwise, too short to necessitate a full blog post.  I do suspect that the 140 character limit may inhibit me a bit; as my own twitter ‘handle’ attests – my writing is usually @FarTooFlorid.  This crampedness of expression was one of my strongest arguments against Twitter, but oh well, here’s to giving the ever loving hell in.

I apologise for the hanging preposition in the title and in the previous sentence.  It will haunt me forever, but “On giving in the ever loving hell” sounds stupid. 

A good evening to you all.