I have previously admitted to being an old white male (although emphatically denying the other stereotypical label of bully). Now it looks like I will also have to put my hand up for being an old prude.
I am certain that is how I will be dismissed by those who do not share my aversion to the use of profanities.
I cannot claim that profanities have never passed my lips. Traffic cones and bad drivers have been known to cause me to drop my guard. In my defence, the expletives are usually confined to the interior of a VW Golf (not a large space), are loudest when I am alone in the car, and are usually regretted. I say ‘usually’ because traffic cones in Auckland deserve all they get.
There is a difference, however, between these isolated short distance explosions and their use in mass media, where they have been used repeatedly to the point where they are ‘normalised’ as apparently acceptable speech.
As an editor I had no problem with reporters using a string of asterisks to signal the use of a profanity if the context made such recognition appropriate. If a politician used a profanity, it was worth noting. If a foul-mouthed gang member did so, why bother? I did not, however, favour preceding the asterisks with the first letter of the word in question because it was little better than spelling out the word itself.
Now these explicit abbreviations appear regularly in printed news stories. In some media the most common swear words are spelt full out.
Two years ago, the (then) Dominion Post took the unprecedented step of publishing full-out on its front page a profane word denoting an intimate part of the female anatomy. It justified its use by saying the public should see the abuse to which women in public office were subjected. Shock tactics? Yes, but there were other ways of getting the public’s attention on a matter of legitimate concern without offending many of the paper’s readers.
It is interesting to note that the word has since been ‘downgraded’ in the Stuff website’s archives to the initial letter and dots. Does that make a difference? I think not. You know the word used, as readily as do I. It may not offend you, but I still find it unacceptably denigrating even in one-to-one conversations let alone in a public medium.
Earlier this year, Constance Grady wrote an article on Vox about a big shift in swear words. She noted changing norms, and the fact that some words now in relatively common use would once have got you arrested. She quoted a professor of cognitive science: “We’re currently experiencing a lot of flux in exactly how offensive particular words are judged to be.”
Her profanity riddled piece traced the life cycle of such words and the growing trend for public officials to swear with apparent abandon. Donald Trump was used as an example, but I think we would forgive him for uttering a few obscenities after last Sunday’s assassination attempt. She concluded that today the most unacceptable words were slurs, while other profanities slipped off the banned list. The worst was a slur used to describe African Americans.
Grady noted that swear words that might shock their parents (and would certainly shock their grandparents) were generally acceptable to millennials and Gen Z. Medievalists point out that some of those words were in common and accepted use during the Middle Ages. So, there is ample evidence that, like language generally, profanities evolve – although I hesitate to use a word that has come to mean survival of the fittest.
Successive generations will use profanities in their own ways: To shock, to assert themselves, to ‘move on’, and to reveal the limits of their vocabulary.
There is a difference, however, between kids impressing each other with the number of naughty words they can use in a single sentence and the dissemination of those words to a mass audience with differing norms and sensibilities.
Newspapers in particular should question their policies on spelling out profanities. Millennials do not read printed newspapers and I suspect Generations Z and Alpha need to have their purpose explained. Newspaper readers are largely drawn from generations that do not share the same linguistic latitude as their offspring or offsprings’ offspring. Yet there is little account taken of their sensitivities.
Perhaps that is because today’s newspapers are generally no more than repurposed online content , written by millennials for millennials. However, that is no justification for the routine inclusion – in the printed version at the very least – of words (or their all-too-obvious abbreviations) that are capable of offending a large proportion of the audience.
I would not go so far as to reissue Richard Nixon’s command (over White House tape transcripts) and require each profanity be replaced by [expletive deleted], although I admit it would be encouraging to see the phrase resurface in the public imagination. Newspapers could, however, adopt two procedures that would serve the same purpose.
The first would be to reserve any indication of the use of profanities to situation where the words were relevant, rather than a form of oral punctuation. Necessity should be the mother of retention. Second, where some form of recognition is warranted, a series of dots or asterisks leaves in the reader in no doubt that there was a swear word uttered. Profanities seldom carry any useful meaning that makes even a description necessary for accurate reporting. Slurs can be described in ways that leave no doubt that the speaker had transgressed, without causing further offence to the intended targets.
However, if seeing profanities in newspapers annoys me, the assault from television and streamed video is infuriating.
At this point I should disclose that, although I wear hearing aids, I often find speech on screen hard to follow so use closed captioning. That does not mean I hear nothing. I hear plenty – even if some is indistinct – and profanities have an unfortunate clarity. However, I get a double dose because each obscenity is faithfully reproduced in the captioning. No abbreviation, no asterisks, just the full word in all of its meaningless disrepute. And more and more of it.
Late last year the Wall Street Journal published the results of a study that used artificial intelligence to identify crude language in over 60,000 movies and television shows produced since 1985. It found use of an obscene description of the sex act rose from 511 utterances in 1985 to 22,177 toward the end of last year. While the use of expletives can be partly explained by an increased volume of production to serve a burgeoning number of streaming platforms, there has been an upward trend. At the beginning of the survey period only about 200 curse words were detected. In the full year of 2022 the number exceeded 60,000.
Last year there was a stand-out. Succession was a four-season series depicting the fictional life of a media mogul Logan Roy – played by Brian Cox – and his family. The season finale featured 235 expletives. Little wonder the Wall Street Journal pointed out it was now possible to get AI-based filters to mask profanities, although I’m not sure there would be much dialogue left in some shows.
Quality is no deterrent. I watched Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell in The Diplomat on Netflix and found their performances (and Debora Cahn’s script) riveting. What I was not taken by was the profane punctuations in the dialogue. It added nothing that could not have been achieved by some expert alternative tweaking by the scriptwriter. It detracted from my enjoyment of the series.
I admit the [expletive deleted] notations that peppered the Nixon White House Tapes transcripts are a fair indication that the U.S. Executive Branch has been no stranger to colourful language. However, do expletives actually add authenticity to dramatic portrayals of the seats of power when they are used as routinely as full stops and certainly more often than exclamation marks?
Yes, yes…I know about dramatic effect. The Hays Office amended the Motion Picture Code in 1939 to allow Clark Gable to use ‘damn’ with great dramatic effect at the end of Gone With The Wind. That single word was packed with meaning.
I doubt that a modern remake – peppered with various constructs around a vulgar expression for sexual intercourse – would have the same enduring quality if Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a ….”
It is a word now used in ways that render it devoid of meaning. It was meaningless in The Diplomat. It is no more than an unnatural pause in speech. As such, it and many other profanities should be kept in perspective by the news and entertainment industries. Frankly, my dears, journalists and scriptwriters should have at least a little regard for old white male prudes like me.
I share your interest in the use of profanities in media, but possibly not your prudishness (I swear a lot in conversations; my father said it indicated laziness).
As an editor in the 80s, I concluded you would probably get away with swear-words of the edgy kind on the arts and books pages (book reviewers feel entitled to indulge: in 2000 I used the “c” word in a newspaper book review and there was nary a squeak), but if you put “bugger” anywhere near the TV programmes you heard from a lot of Mums.
That was until the TV advert with the sheep dog falling snout first into a mud-puddle and uttering it. That seemed to change everything, and is still broadcast today.
On one occasion, I did get carried away by insisting its removal from a Footrot Flats cartoon; the subeditor handling it thought I had gone mad. (I think it was “bugger”, but it might have been something else).
I recall in the 90s watching a TV reporter going into a house to tell someone they’d won a big prize of some sort and getting a repeated response that included “holy shit”. After that, the latter word seemed to pass into general acceptance, although not necessarily in newspapers. David Lange uttering it, however, was front page stuff.
These days, I think the “f” word would go there if openly uttered by anyone newsworthy being the subject of an assassination attempt. It surely indicates the raw immediacy of someone’s reaction to something shocking. You did cede that point.
The trail-blazing first editor of Metro magazine, Warwick Roger, used f… about 50 times in direct quotes in a profile he wrote on a South Island endurance running race organiser. It worked because it told us as much about the subject as anything else he said. The use of bad language is an important pointer to someone’s character.
Last point: I never see or hear swear words in soaps like Emmerdale and Coro St, so I presume the “law” discouraging profanities in places where children might see them is still extant.