and Obscenity
The use of profane words comprises about half a percent of a typical person’s vocabulary.61 Virtually every language contains its share of profane words. Why? Researchers say it’s because by using profanities, we are able to express what ordinary words don’t enable us to express on their own. Also, hurling profanities enables us to convey our emotions symbolically rather than physically. When accepting an award on live television, rock singer Bono commented, “This is really, really f—king brilliant.” An NBC news broadcaster, not realizing they were still on the air, yelled at the cohost. “What the f—k are you doing?” Students at one college screamed obscenities at a recent college basketball game, targeting a player who had chosen not to play for their school, yelling vulgarities at him and calling his relatives whores.62 Has it become acceptable to utter obscenities in public, including in the media?
According to Timothy Jay, a leading scholar on cursing in the United States, contemporary teenagers are more likely to use expletives casually, uttering swear words 80 to 90 times each day. Because the lines between public and private language are blurred, today’s teens have more difficulty than teens in previous generations adjusting their conversation to fit their audience.63
Profanity in the Workplace
Profanity has also sought a home in the workplace. A female employee of a major construction company felt compelled to complain to the director of human resources about the cursing used in the company’s facilities. The company responded by publishing “A Language Code of Ethics.” It defined inappropriate language as “unwanted deliberate, repeated, unsolicited profanity, cussing, swearing, vulgar, insulting, abusive or crude language. The company is now a cuss-free workplace and workers who violate the policy can be disciplined.”64
Profanity has become common, especially in high-stress jobs. Some policies differentiate between “casual” and “causal” swearing. Casual swearing is bad language we use for the fun of it, because we are too lazy to use other words when we think we can get away with it. Causal swearing is profanity produced by the inability to control an aroused emotion, such as anger, frustration, or impatience.65
Why are we so comfortable using profanity? Might it be because profanity and speech that degrades have become so much a part of our mediated language landscape, used in virtually every crime-adventure television, cable program, or film? Commonplace profanities now function as fillers—they slide off the tongue much as the words you know and like.
Reclamation of Profanity and Slurs
The use of insults, vulgar expressions, and speech that degrades and encourages hostility in others is on the rise. How are those against whom these words are used responding? In some cases, pejorative words that are used to stigmatize or demonstrate contempt for the members of a group are reclaimed by the group and redefined by group members as positive in nature.
For example, gays and lesbians adopted the terms queer (denoting a refusal of traditional sexual identity categories) and genderqueer (to reject conventional gender distinctions) as labels for new ways of experiencing sexuality and gender and to make positive statements about who they are.66 Some women proudly refer to themselves as girls. While the “n-word” was coined by slave traders over 400 years ago to degrade Blacks, some African Americans, in an effort to invalidate the meaning that bigots attached to it, use the epithet among themselves.67
On the other hand, websites like abolishthenword.com and college and public forums have explored the n-word’s usage, with some critics attempting to encourage the elimination of casual use of the word. Lawmakers have even sponsored resolutions to ban the word’s use totally. Contrastingly, the website niggaspace.com draws a distinction between differently spelled versions of the n-word. According to the site’s founder, “nigga” embodies brotherhood and fraternity, not ignorance and hate.68
In your opinion, can we solve the problem of racism by banning or respelling a word? For example, when advertisers criticized radio talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger for using this racial epithet on the air, she resigned because she did not want to have to prune her words, noting that African Americans use the word themselves.69 Words, as we see, however, can take on different meanings depending on who uses them. A book publisher decided to issue a new version of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn replacing every use of the n-word in the novel with the word “slave.” In your opinion, does taking the n-word out change the novel substantially? Do you think keeping the n-word in Twain’s book promotes racism, or does it reflect the period of history accurately?70
Technology and Language Use
In excess of one trillion text messages are sent and received in the United States annually.71 We frequently use text-messaging shorthand in our e-mails, posts, texts, and tweets. Some believe that our text-based culture is a key cause of the trend toward speaking in extremely short sentences. Additionally, some suggest that the excessive use of texting is contributing to our devaluing instantaneous or improvisational conversation—and eventually could cause face-to-face conversation to become obsolete, replaced by virtual and online options.
Gifs Front and Center
Consider the smartphone-propelled use of GIFs, 3-second video loops prominent on sites like Twitter. These constitute a visual language all their own, absent facts and context but rife with emotion. We might add they are also often absent words, leading some to wonder if visual culture will become so dominant globally that we won’t need words.72 Whether in time GIFs will replace complex thought or not, right now online speak is proving to be pervasive.
Online Speak
If you’re like many students, you may lapse into online speak even when writing offline. When writing a paper for his economics class, one student wrote, “Surplus is an excess. But surplus can also b 2 much.” His instructor deducted 10 points. The protocol of informality that marks digital communication finds us now debating whether the Internet invigorates language or strips it of its expressive power.73
When linguists talk of dialects, by tradition they are referring to the spoken word. Online speak and texting, however, have spawned a new written dialect, one in between speech and writing. In online speak, punctuation is abandoned, capital letters are used primarily to represent shouting, and an array of acronyms substitute for phrases. Knowing and using the dialect allows us to develop a sense of belonging to the group—a group that exists in cyberspace.
As we see, texting has its own private language or code. In fact, some young adults use acronyms to keep their parents from discovering their involvement with drugs, alcohol, or casual sex. It is not uncommon to find people together in one room, but they text rather than speak to one another. Why? They want to share but don’t want others to hear what they are saying. Have you ever been part of or privy to such behavior, perhaps when in a car, a classroom, or your own living room? We use texting as a means of creating a social circle apart from others.
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Misunderstanding texting lingo can be embarrassing.
