FOUL MOUTH
Language Turns Deeper Shade of Blue
by Barbara Vancheri

     Guess those boys in the mall arcade didn't see the sign hanging a few feet away: "No smoking, drinking, food or chewing, abusive language," Maybe that explains the six expletives--common curses and a 12-letter lulu--muttered within a single minute while playing a road racing game.

     Or maybe they just don't give a...darn.

     Let's face it. If you're on profanity patrol today, you're working overtime.

     Just consider a recent episode of television's "Roseanne." Dad Dan Conner (John Goodman) exploded when he learned his daughter Darlene had been living with her teen-age boyfriend, David, at college. He called David a "lying little bastard" during the show that also sprinkled two damns and one hell through the dialogue.

     In an interview published in Entertainment Weekly this month, actor Martin Lawrence complained about limits the Fox network places on his sitcom. "I have to fight and fight to do the `Martin' show my way. You can't say this, you can't say that."

     Sounding like a starving man in a cafeteria linguistics line, Lawrence said he's allowed only "two asses a show, one damn" per program. Fox executives argue the series airs at 8 p.m., and Lawrence counters, "Hey, people know `Martin.' They ain't surprised by this s---."

     During the Groundhog Day "blab-a-thon" on WTAE Radio, the name Martha Stewart (she of the magazine, television show and daintily homemade everything, from Valentine lollipops to marzipan garden cakes) came up. "Screw Martha Stewart!" decreed Lynn Cullen, already time-taxed to the max. "We can say that on the air, can't we?"

     Sounds pretty mild.

     After all, a first-grader calls another a jackass on the school bus. T-shirts and bumper stickers proclaim "S--- happens." Cable television, music videos, gangsta rappers, daring morning disc jockeys, and adult TV shows such as "NYPD Blue" have all pushed the envelope, turned it inside out and painted it blue. Guns N' Roses remakes the song "Since I Don't Have You" and, as our critic reported, sticks the "big daddy of all cuss words smack dab in the middle."

     And when's the last time you saw a G-rated movie that wasn't a Disney special?

     "Except for certain animated films and other overt kids' fare, the G rating is considered the kiss of death because teens won't go to a perceived `kiddie' pic," the trade paper Variety reports. "Filmmakers handed a G rating regularly insert a profanity to graduate to PG." That's why naughty words are slipped into the mouths of preadolescents or oldsters such as Burgess Meredith in "Grumpy Old Men."

     Profanity seems more pervasive than ever but America's dirty mouth isn't new.

     "Cursing and obscenity have been around for hundreds of years. It's more like a pendulum that swings back and forth," says Timothy Jay, author of "Cursing in America" and a psychology professor at North Adams State College in Massachusetts. Jay has been dubbed the "doctor of dirty words" and the "preeminent scholar of profanity."

     What is new, in Jay's opinion, is the incorporation of offensive language into the new electronic media--plus the fact that women are swearing more often on the job and in public.

     "I notice on the campus here women swear a lot more freely than they do anywhere else in the culture," says Jay, who has been interested in taboo talk since high school, when the nightly news carried chants of "Hell, no, we won't go" to Vietnam. "Certainly I've seen women's ice hockey and college rugby matches where the swearing is much like men's. It's as offensive and as frequent as men's."

     In his book--more a scholarly tome than bedtime reading for Howard Stern--Jay provides a chart on the "likelihood of hearing a curse word in a campus occupation." A male athletic coach tops the list with an 82.50 rating (out of a possible 100); least likely is a female librarian, with just a 7.87 chance of hearing wicked whispers in the stacks.

     Although teens sometimes act as if they invented the f word --along with cigarette smoking and bad driving habits--that crude usage has been around since 1200 A.D., Jays says. And while it's tossed around a lot more, limits on its use in certain circles still exist.

     "We have institutions like the press, the media and the church that tell us the word is bad and powerful. It is more commonplace on the street, in the barroom and in school than it ever has been.

     "But you're still not going to use that word in front of your grandmother or priest or if you get stopped by the police or at a high school graduation ceremony. There are too many sanctions against that," he says.

     Elizabeth Raisig, a junior at Woodland Hills High School, seconds that notion. "I would never swear in front of adults. I would never think about it," she says, but admits her language isn't G-rated all the time either.

     The 16-year-old thinks profanity became part of the school landscape around sixth grade when everyone was trying to act grown up. Now, she says, "People swear all the time. I guess you stop noticing."

     The penalties, however, haven't disappeared and students cursing in the classroom are disciplined, and teammates on Raisig's girls' soccer team get "yellow-carded" or penalized for swearing. "People try to watch their mouths. I guess if you got hit really hard, unless you're screaming it, no one's going to say anything, or unless, it's directed at another player or official" you might get off the hook.

     Although Donna and Jim Bell are both teachers, their experiences with profanity are miles apart--literally and figuratively. Donna teaches fifth grade at Osborne Elementary in the Quaker Valley School District while Jim is a health and physical education teacher at Moon Senior High School.

     "The children at the grade level I have work very hard for the teacher not to hear anything," says Donna Bell. "Every now and then, they will slip and come out in the classroom" with a mild curse. "One boy used `damn,' and said, `I didn't know it was a swear word.'" He does now.

     She lays down the law about what's acceptable. "I say very candidly on the first day of school, `We don't have any swearing,'" and that includes taking God's name in vain. She tells them to use the words rear or bottom--not butt or ass. When she started teaching 17 years ago, she never heard the distasteful phrase "This sucks" or the challenge, "I'm gonna kick your butt."

     The school, in fact, is so strict about language that teachers wanting to show videos end up with the old-fashioned G- rated ones. "We do a whole lot of Walt Disney classics--`Journey to the Center of the Earth,' Don Knotts-Tim Conway kinds of things," she says.

     Bell, a mother of four adult children, says parents must spell out ground rules about language. "Parents just have to realize...the second 10 years are much harder" than the first. "I don't know if parents realize how much children rely on them," and how much they appreciate the limits placed on them.

     At Moon Senior High School, probably like any other high school in the area, verboten words vibrate through the hallways. "Boys, especially, go through a period when they're learning to swear. Every other word out of their mouths is a swear word. At Moon, they're just not allowed to, but it goes on. It's a constant correction," says Jim Bell.

     "In athletics, all you got to do is turn the tube on and watch the college coaches and their mouths. You'll see swearing, great profanity," even though it's of the read-their-lips variety. But that doesn't grant students permission to swear inside or outside the classroom.

     "I just don't tolerate it. I don't think I've ever been sworn at by a student," the 28-year teaching veteran says. On the bright side, though, he says, "It leaves them. They go through a period from 9th through 12th grades, where their mouths are foul. They grow out of it. They really do."

     What about when they're trapped in that foul-weather period? What can you do when your child talks like he's shipping out with the merchant marine or has been hired as an extra in "Menance II Society"?

     The best you can hope for, some experts say, is to control the language in your home and your presence. That goes for your children and for their friends while they're visiting.

     "My advice to parents: Save their ammunition, the big guns, for the major events in this life but they have the right to set rules," says Lois Greenberg, director of outpatient services for the Parent and Child Guidance Center on Banksville Road. Tell your child certain words are not permitted in your home.

     "They're not acceptable. There are penalties to be paid. If you can't control your mouth in my presence I have to make some assumptions about the level of your maturity," which could mean curtailing use of the car or other privileges for younger children, she says.

     "You can't stop the swearing and you can't control behavior outside the home, but make it clear by reinforcing home values and standards and limiting it there. That's a clear message to the child. What you're trying to do, basically, is impart values to the child.

     "Then you sit back and pray a lot and hope some of it gets through," she says.

     Parents should realize, of course, that young children go through a "dirty mouth" phase while adolescents have their macho periods when they take great pleasure in shaking up adults. If you make too big a deal out of words, children may take great delight in repeating them and repeating them.

     Like all parents, Greenberg struggled with this issue in her own home. "I personally took the tack with my kids that I knew they didn't get it from strangers, but I was trying very, very hard to break my own bad habits. Just because I slipped now and then didn't mean I was giving them permission [to curse]." It just meant her self-control had lapsed.

     So if you're going to lecture your children about language, watch your own.

     On the bright side of the profanity patrol, though, professor Jay says cursing has its merits. "This language allows us to alleviate frustration, express a sense of humor, talk about sexuality and tell other people when they've done something wrong or made mistakes without physically communicating that.

     "When someone cuts me off at a stoplight and I yell ass----, I don't want to fight with them, but it tells them they were thoughtless and it usually stops there," he says. And it makes him feel a helluva lot better.

     That's the same reason that elderly patients in nursing homes sometimes swear like, well, teenagers. "This language starts as soon as kids can talk and persists even in the midst of dementia--they don't know who they are, who their spouses are but they still know how to swear," Jay says.

     Like teens who feel a loss of control, power and predictability, some geriatric patients express themselves in a very basic--if crude--way. "This lexicon is very persistent, very primitive, deep in the brain," Jay says. "It's one of the last things to go."