"To the unconsciously indelicate all things are delicate. For it is not the word that is the sin, it is the spirit back of the word."
Mark Twain (Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism)
Reading Jay Dixit's truly wonderful interview with George Carlin this morning, the following passage brought back to mind the sorts of thoughts Carlin always provoked:
What’s the funniest bit you’ve ever heard?
"Sometimes jokes have a wonderful logic to them. I’ll give you one that, even to people that don’t mind mild cursing, bothers some people—especially women. Short joke. The wonderful thing about it is the logic of the joke, the ingenuity.
"Father and son, little son are out on the back porch, passing the day, father says to son, “Do you have perhaps any questions for me about sex?” And he says, “Well, yeah Dad, what is that hairy area on Mommy?” And the father says, “Well, that’s her vulva.” And the boy says, “Well then what’s a cunt?” And the father says, “That’s rest of Mommy.”
"And that joke strikes a nerve, hits a chord—men who’ve been divorced more than twice really like that. It makes beautiful use of that man’s thought. To arrive at that distinction—to take it from the real to the figurative. From cunt as a sexual part to cunt as a term of derision for women, just as men are called assholes by certain women—and they deserve it. It’s funny how we use words. The fact that a mean woman is called a cunt and a mean man is called a prick. I have a long thing I’d like to write someday about language and the way we address each other."
Offensive? Illuminating? Illuminating in its offensiveness?
Above all else, George Carlin loved language. He loved the trickiness of it, the subtlety, the way the same word shines differently in the distinct light of a certain context, intelligence, or moment in time. Though it was far from his most penetrating bit, The Seven Words You Cannot Say on Television is surely his most well-known routine. So, in his honor, let's take a look at language and the peculiar American tendency to take offense at the obvious.
We Americans are not alone in our use of salty expressions -- far from it. But what is an American peculiarity, as far as I know, is the asinine habit we've formed in the past decade or two of wrapping the word we dare not say in "the C-word," or "the N-word," as if we're speaking in the presence of children who haven't yet learned to spell.
What the (F-word) are we doing? Who the (H-word) are we kidding?
I've noticed that those fine barometers of cultural change, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, have taken to just saying what comes to mind, knowing that it'll be bleeped out before broadcast. But what is the bleeping covering up when we're watching Stewart's mouth form the word being bleeped out? Like pasties over a stripper's nipples... don't we all know she's got nipples under there? What's being hidden, really, and from whom?
Shortly after I'd moved to Manhattan a long time ago, I went down to Washington Square Park to soak in some of that big-city magic. I bought a big blue can of Foster's and wandered over to a bench in the park, near where the Rastas were hanging out. The smell of ganja was thick in the air. Within a minute or two a few police descended upon me. I couldn't imagine what for. Turns out, it's ok to drink a beer on the street in New York, but you've got to have a paper bag around it. Another lesson learned -- but still not understood.
I just don't get it.
If I write that this habit of masking reality from ourselves makes us look like f#@&ing idiots to the rest of the world, we all know what word I had in mind, right? So if the word I had in mind is being communicated to my readers anyway -- despite the fact that I didn't actually write it, what then is the point of this silly game?
Shakespeare had it that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," and right he was. Did The Bard also mention that no matter what you call it, shit smells just as foul? Call it poop if you like, or excrement, or feces, or the fetid by-product of your heaving loins… I don't give a rat's a#$. But word choice doesn't matter much once you've stepped in it.
As it turns out, Spain, where we live, is a wonderful place for salty language. Here they "shit in the milk of the Virgin" if things go wrong, or shout out my personal favorite: "Cago en el mar salado" -- I shit in the salty sea! Imagine having the presence of mind to scream that next time you slam your finger in a door. The Spanish C-word, coño, is everywhere -- and I can assure you that nobody gets worked up about it, and NOBODY is substituting "la palabra C" -- which would be incomprehensibly absurd.
Perhaps not coincidentally, there are not -- to my knowledge -- Spanish expressions like "collateral damage" to mask the slaughter of innocents from the sky, "extreme rendition" to obscure the brutal truth of government-sponsored torture, or "military contractors" to refer to what are, in fact, mercenaries.
Reality will be what it is, no matter what verbal brown bag we try to wrap around it. To paraphrase Philip K. Dick, reality is that which, when you stop mentioning it, doesn't disappear.
I think George Carlin would agree that all words have the potential for beauty -- even the ugly, hurtful ones. They've got resonance, music, and history. Sometimes that resonance can be disturbing, but please, let's stop pretending we're fooling anyone with these silly substitution games; we're only making fools of ourselves.
Now I'll shut the (beep) up.
