SWEARING'S IN
by Tom McGrath

     It became clear to me that swearing had become nearly epidemic in our society the day Mrs. Thomas C. Leonards Jr. of Berwyn, a member of the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and a leading Main Line socialite, told me about the recent occasion on which someone had, well, flipped her off.

     "I had a problem with a young girl the other day when I was driving," said Mrs. Leonards, a lovely woman whom I had called for the sole purpose of talking about swearing. "And she threw the bird at me! Now, I might expect that out of a young boy, but a young girl?"

     In case you hadn't noticed, swearing has gone legit. After literally ages of being confined largely to foxholes, barrooms, R-rated movies and Eddie Murphy monologues, four-letter words and their nonverbal brethren have now marched triumphantly out of the closet and moved, with a macho swagger, right into the middle of polite society. Indeed, we are living in an age where practically everyone swears, where hardly anyone asks us to pardon his French anymore, where not even Daughters of the American Revolution are safe. Forget about the fabled New World Order; what we've got here is a New Word Order.

     "Oh, absolutely, I think people are definitely swearing more than they used to," says Philadelphia City Council member, man about town and, it turns out, "F" word-user Thacher Longstreth. "I know I am. I hardly cursed at all for about 20 or 30 years, partly because I was raising kids and partly because I was traveling in polite society. Then, recently, I began to curse again."

     Just how much cursing is going on? Not surprisingly, statistics on the subject are hard to come by, although one recent Wednesday evening I phoned 25 friends and found that 20 of them--80 percent--had sworn at least once during the day. Granted, this particular study may prove only that I ought to start hanging out with a better class of people. Nevertheless, other anecdotal evidence tells the same story. A lawyer friend informs me that among many members of the Philadelphia bar, the "F" word has become nearly as popular as the "L" word (litigation), while another friend says much the same thing about doctors. And kids? Get caught in a pack of them, as I recently did at the King of Prussia mall, and you'll undoubtedly feel as if you've been plopped down in the middle of Charlie Company just as it's getting ready to take the next hill.

     Of course, the best example of this New Word Order is probably the increased use--and acceptance--of profanity in public. In October, Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Todd Stottlemyre, fresh off a war of words with our own Mayor Rendell, stood in front of 50,000 screaming fans and invited Big Ed to kiss his "A" word. Meanwhile, convicted daughter-slaughterist Vivian King swore so much during her recent trial that many started to wonder if her testimony had been scripted by gag writers for the late Redd Foxx. Maybe most significant, this season ABC's "NYPD Blue" has broken the no-swearing taboo on network television, filling the once-pure airwaves with a stream of damns and hells and "A" words and "S" words. And getting terrific ratings in the process.

     Simply put, never before have so many curse words been uttered so widely and yet offended so few.

     Now, there are certainly many people out there who wonder whether America's newfound love of cursing is such a good thing, and, frankly, their concern is understandable. I, however, have a different question:

     If the Daughters of the American Revolution aren't immune from all this cursing, well, pardon my French, but just who the hell is?

     Swearing, of course, is an ancient phenomenon. In fact, the four-letter words we now use so frequently are in many ways the spiritual descendants of the oaths (swearing by some deity or other higher power) and curses (calling on that same higher power to really give your enemy the business) of earlier times. What's more, sociologists and other experts have concluded that practically all societies--even those that academics call "nonliterate"--swear in one way or another.

     During the 1960s, for example, a British researcher named Donald Thompson spent time with Australian aborigines and got an earful. "In a camp of the Yintjingga tribe on the estuary of the Stewart River," the esteemed Dr. Thompson wrote, "a child about 2 years of age, that was being suckled at its mother's breast, dropped the nipple to glower at me and exclaim in the Ompela language of its mother, Awu! Kuna katta! Kuna katta! `Devil! Excrement foul! Excrement foul!'"

     Out of the mouths of babes....

     In America, we've frowned upon foul language since colonial times. Although he himself was supposedly a pretty fair swearer, George Washington was so aware of society's disdain for foul language that he once gave a general order instructing all American troops to refrain from "the foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing."

     This attitude prevailed in America through the Victorian era and well into the middle of this century, as children literally had their mouths washed out with soap and young men and women were constantly reminded how improper four-letter words were. My father once told me, in fact, that when he was a kid in the 1930s and 1940s there was a sign at his local YMCA reading: Cursing is the crutch of the conversational cripple.

     It was right around midcentury, though, that things began to change. "I think it started in World War II," Thacher Longstreth said. "When I was in the service, everybody swore. And that was definitely when the `F' word reached a point of great versatility. One time I actually heard somebody say, `Oh, [`F' word]! That [`F' worder's `F' wordin' `F' worded].'"

     While acceptance of the "F" word and its four-lettered friends was hardly immediate--it was only a generation ago, after all, that the U.S. postmaster general tried to stop the distribution of LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER--in the decades that followed the war such words did gain a toehold in society. why the increased acceptance?

     Experts point to a number of things, starting with the fact that in recent years many of us have, well, lost our religion. "I think it's all part of the secularizing of the world," says Roger Abrahams, a professor of folklore and folklife at the University of Pennsylvania and a man whose doctoral dissertation contained an entire chapter on the "MF" word (for this reason Abrahams has been called--and I'm not making this up--"the world's leading expert" on the "MF" word). "Most swear words began as curses--for example, `Go to hell.' Well, that idea of swearing or cursing is no longer with us because nobody believes that words can do that anymore. Words have lost their mystical power."

     Others point to the anti-authoritarian, comparatively informal nature of the last few decades, in which many things that were once hidden or forbidden--premarital sex, homosexuality, drinking Coke in the morning--became far more acceptable. I once heard comedian George Carlin say, for example, that the reason he used so many four-letter words in his act was simply that he didn't like parts of the language being off-limits for what seemed to be no good reason.

     Lastly, there is the impact of the movies. For generations Hollywood was bound by a production code that prohibited nudity or indecent language on film, but during the 1960s that code, swept up in a sea of social and legal challenges, was abandoned. The result? A landslide of cinematic swearing, one that's only gotten more severe with time. According to a study done a couple of years ago at North Adams State College in Massachusetts, movies made during the 1980s contained, on average, 81 curse words, up from an average of 24 in movies made during the 1960s and an average of 1.5 in movies made before that.

     All this, then, has served to create the current climate, in which cursing is cool, in which people feel freer than ever to let loose those once-forbidden four-letter words, in which the offended few hardly bother to balk anymore. A spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission, for instance, said that complaints about indecency on radio and TV actually peaked in 1987, when the FCC received more than 20,000 of them--more than three times what it received last year.

     Indeed, swearing has now become so commonplace that to be a non-swearer is almost to be ostracized. Clearly that's why ABC let "NYPD Blue" on the air. To compete with all those sexy, foul- mouthed movies on cable, the big cheeses at ABC said, they had no choice but to allow nudity and rough language.

     Corporations aren't the only ones feeling such peer pressure; people are too.

     Take, for instance, Susan Maister. A 32-year-old mother of two from New Jersey (and the sister-in-law of a friend of mine), Maister was at a New Year's Eve party a couple of years ago when the conversation turned to the fact that she never, ever used foul language. The crowd was so amazed by this that someone actually dared her to say the "F" word. When she refused, things got really serious--they offered her money. As Maister pondered the offer, partygoers tried to prompt her by chanting the dreaded expletive, so that outside the house the muffled sounds of Uck! Uck! Uck! could be heard up and down the quiet suburban street. Should she do it?

     Uck! Uck! Uck!

     Would she do it?

     Uck! Uck! Uck!

     Could she do it?

     Uck! Uck! Uck!

     She did it.

     "Actually, when I finally said it, it was more like `F-f- f...,'" Maister told me, re-enacting the stammer with which the word finally passed her lips. "It took me a while to get it out."

     Is all this swearing good for society? Some say yes, and they do make some persuasive arguments. First, there is the fact that swearing offers a great emotional release, and in a nation of heart attacks waiting to happen that may not be such a bad thing. On top of that is the ridiculous sense of delicacy inherent in banning certain words. Why is it proper, after all, to say "he knew her in the biblical sense," but not use the "F" word?

     Still, for all the arguments in favor of cursing, there are at least an equal number against it. First of all, there are those who see all this cursing as just another example of--to borrow political columnist George F. Will's phrase--the coarsening of American life.

     "There's just so much raunch out there, don't you think?" asked my Daughters of the American Revolution friend, Mrs. Leonards. "As my husband has said to me: `English is such a beautiful language. Why don't people use it?'"

     Others, ironically, are more troubled by the damage all this swearing is doing to swearing. After all, to really be effective, swearing has to shock people, and these days that's increasingly difficult. "It's really become just talk." Professor Abrahams said. "The big words are really losing their punch."

     I have to admit that, as someone who enjoys a good four- letter word now and again, this last point made a particular impression on me. Indeed, I actually started to think about the very first time I cursed. I was about 10 or 11 years old, I guess, and walking home from school with my buddy Pete Philbin. As we cut through someone's back yard I accidently stepped in a pile that one of the neighborhood dogs had left behind.

     "S" word, I muttered.

     Pete's eyes bugged out of his head. "Wow," he said with a tone in his voice that I can't remember eliciting from anyone since. "I don't think I ever heard you curse before."

     I just smiled.

     Frankly, after my discussion with Mrs. Leonards, I was fairly certain that there couldn't be any group, any area of life, that swearing hadn't touched. But then one day it struck me:

     Nuns.

     Which is why one recent evening I went to see a young nun named Sister Ann, who, coincidentally, lives not all that far from Mrs. Leonards. I had come, I told Sister Ann, because I figured that religious life might be the last place on earth free of swearing.

     "That's probably true," she said with a laugh, although as we talked she noted that the parents of her students occasionally used bad language in front of her. "Sometimes I just can't believe the things they're saying," she told me.

     And does the good sister ever, you know, slip with her own language?

     "Well, now that I think about," she said, "maybe when I'm driving."

     Suddenly a horrible notion hit me, one involving Sister Ann, Mrs. Leonards and, well, a little bird.

     But no, I finally decided as I left the convent, some things are too bizarre even for the New Word Order.

     Tom McGrath is a freelance writer who lives in Ardmore.