Naughty Words

As the latest linguistic outrage fades from view outside the Beltway, I thought it might be useful to review how we classify language we don’t like hearing, regardless of what comes out of our own mouths when we stub a toe.

In France, where I’m teaching in a study-abroad program until June, the prevailing term is mots salés, “salty words.” Some children think of them as “bad” words, as if the words themselves are misbehaving and must be punished by excision. When I was a kid, the consequence of using such language might be having your mouth washed out with soap, as if to reify the notion of soilage by cleaning the place where you formed the dirty word.

But not all dirty words are alike. The Federal Communications Commission, for instance, categorizes problematic content as “obscene,” “indecent,” or “profane.” The first category has to do exclusively with sex and is subject to a three-pronged test before banning: The word or phrase “must appeal to an average person’s prurient interest; depict or describe sexual conduct in a ‘patently offensive’ way; and, taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

Perhaps there was a time when large numbers could agree on who was average, what was prurient, what was patently offensive, and what was meant by political value. If so, that time is long gone. Since obscenity is not covered by the First Amendment, it would be helpful to know what we think is obscene these days, but we don’t seem to have moved much past the opinion voiced by Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court, in reversing Ohio’s ban of the Louis Malle film The Lovers, in which he said of hard-core pornography (the only kind of material that met his standard for obscenity), “I know it when I see it.”

More problematic still are the other FCC categories, with which not only broadcast but also print media must wrestle at a time when we seem to have a perfect storm of change: Cable and satellite outlets and internet publications don’t follow the same rules as so-called mainstream media; sexual mores are being challenged in at least two directions, with claims of more fluid sexuality and sexual expression opening doors to some previously shocking language, while the #MeToo movement pushes back against language tainted with sexism. And politicians at the highest level make pronouncements that were once deemed unprintable.

Interestingly, the categories themselves — “indecent” and “profane” — don’t exactly match how many of us distinguish one type of dirty word from another. “Indecent,” for instance, covers language that refers to both sexual and “excretory” organs and activities. It fails to meet the three-pronged test for obscenity, but apparently no such three-pronged test exists for excretory matters, despite ample evidence that at least some portion of the population can develop a prurient interest in such matters. Most media discussions of the president’s use of the term shithole called the word vulgar, which is how I’ve always thought of such terms. It seems fitting, after all, since vulgar itself means common, ordinary, of the people — or, as the popular children’s book has it, Everyone Poops.

The third FCC category, “profane,” is defined as “‘grossly offensive’ language that is considered a public nuisance.” I assume this odd definition is meant to apply, for instance, to the use of the f-word as an expletive, unbound by reference to a sexual act. But when I was taught not to use profanity, the rule applied almost exclusively to the religious taboo against taking the name of your God in vain — or, by extension, treating anything sacred with contempt by using its name as an intensifier or expletive. Granted, since we live in a country without blasphemy laws, my sense of profane speech can’t reasonably be considered a “public nuisance.” In a heralded New York Times essay titled “The Case for Profanity in Print,” the lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower looped vulgarities and obscenities under the umbrella of profanity. Still, I find the old-fashioned definition useful if only because we don’t blink an eye at a public figure’s “Christ Almighty!” anymore. Perhaps the day is dawning when we won’t blink the other eye at their references to bodily functions. (Though, one hopes, we might still gasp at baldly racist or sexist remarks, regardless of the language couching them.) At the same time, language’s power to shock is one of its strongest weapons.

What form will that shock take, when today’s dirty words lose the gleam of their filth?