If you look at news stories online, you’ll find numerous comments, many advocating for one political position over another. Depending on the nature of the online site, the comments made by the site’s regular readers will generally be in agreement on the subject of the day. Some dissenters, however, will engender vitriol. At times, you’ll come across some “rough” language that emphasizes the writer’s feelings on a subject—language once shunned in public forums governed by propriety.
There has always been a division between what we might term Propriety—or a fictional Dignity ascribed to “Victorians”— and its antithesis, that is the Vulgarity of Bar Talk, Street Talk, or lifestyle. No doubt the Romans, from whose language we derive the word vulgarity (“common people”), had their own crude ways of expressing raw feelings, and probably every predecessor civilization with classes (e.g., patricians and plebeians) recognized differences in expression and lifestyle. I suppose that a grey line of demarcation between the vulgar on one side and the sophisticated on the other side was never drawn in caves—but I could be wrong. Did Indo-European house vulgar expressions before it branched into all those other languages?
That vulgarity is common in online forums used by both the “the educated and the uneducated” and by “the famous and the infamous” is in part the result of years of insidiousness. Think of vulgarity’s creeping into film, for example. Rhett Butler’s last words to Scarlett in Gone with the Wind contained in 1940 maybe the most shocking public use of damn: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” By comparison, that use of damn is by today’s movie standards, quite “tame.” At its worst in the twenty-first century, the word would probably elicit only the mildest of warnings to potential viewers and a rating of PG-13. Decorum ain’t what it used to be. Many film scripts are now laced with “profanities” that seem “perfectly normal” to moviegoers who consider more offensive than crude talk the use of the “wrong pronoun” or the appropriation of a culture, such as team names like “Braves,” “Indians,” “Redskins,” or “Chiefs.” Vulgar language? In an everything-goes society of feelings, vulgarity is what you say it is, but, for sure, your own vulgarity isn’t vulgar. Older “standards of decorum” always undergo change to the chagrin of elders who perceive their societal responsibility to offspring as the handing-down of culture.
With the spread of social and agenda-driven media, we have descended into an open pit of vulgarity larger than the Escondida Copper Mine. And anything, given the preferences of the “offended,” can be vulgar. No longer does one have to hide the rawest of feelings and judgments in an ironic twist that enables the vulgar to use vulgarity to condemn what they consider to be the most vulgar expressions, that is, expressions with which they disagree. Again, however, I’ll emphasize that as long as there have been “civilized” people, there has been vulgarity. My hypothesis is that since the rise of language, most have been exposed to vulgarity of one kind or another. The formalization of language after Gutenberg is what makes the endurance of the original form of curse words stand out against the changing spelling and use of all other words. How is it that the formalized language has undergone so many changes after it became codified in print whereas the vulgar words traditionally banned from print have remained largely unchanged?
Anyone who has lived a few decades doesn’t need a linguist or philologist to say that language changes all the time. “In-words” and common expressions arise with each generation. But there are exceptions to the trend of linguistic evolution: A vocabulary of enduring curse words permeates every culture’s native tongue and defies the tendency toward change (e.g., in the twentieth century drive-through became drive-thru). In contrast to the many changed words stands that ubiquitous “F” word. It first appeared in print in the early sixteenth century, indicating that it probably had a much earlier verbal appearance among the illiterate that probably made up the majority of people in pre-Gutenberg generations. Could it be that vulgarity is an inherent vice of human nature? Could William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, have been correct in saying that the only check on savagery is societal norms and that that check is weak at best?
I remember driving a two-lane road road through Amish country in eastern Ohio. My wife and I passed a barn-raising that would have made Norman Rockwell pause to paint. At least a dozen (counting is difficult at 50 mph) Amish men constructed, and as many Amish women set picnic tables while children played. We passed horse-drawn plows, women hanging clothes to dry just as so many Americans did before the invention of electric dryers, and a few people sitting on homemade porch furniture. She commented on the communal nature of their society and said as we passed their quaintness that it seemed like a society without the rush of modernism and vice, a community, she surmised, without crime. I disagreed. “They have vices,” I said, “and vulgarity.” Just moments later we passed a black Amish buggy headed in the opposite direction with two teenage boys, one of them holding the reins while the other leaned against the buggy’s back wall to hide from any passerby the cigarette he was smoking. I couldn’t resist, as you might guess. I said, “See! Humans have vices; Amish are humans; Amish have vices. I think I’ve completed my syllogism.”
Thomas Bowdler and Anthony Comstock aside, there’s little doubt that we humans have a vulgar side (major premise). People in chat rooms are humans (minor premise). People in chat rooms have a vulgar side (conclusion). Because chat rooms and comment sections are open to everyone, they are also open to use by the “vulgaris.” And even if there were societal restrictions against vulgarity—in fact, there are such rules, as movie and TV ratings attest—they would be no more effective at stopping vulgarity than gun laws are at stopping criminals from obtaining guns. The masses will be masses. And at the heart of all masses of humans lies a common thread, the potential to be vulgar that emerges in a billion conversations every day. About the only way to stop vulgarity and foster civility is by silence—a condition that isn’t feasible.
There has always been a division between what we might term Propriety—or a fictional Dignity ascribed to “Victorians”— and its antithesis, that is the Vulgarity of Bar Talk, Street Talk, or lifestyle. No doubt the Romans, from whose language we derive the word vulgarity (“common people”), had their own crude ways of expressing raw feelings, and probably every predecessor civilization with classes (e.g., patricians and plebeians) recognized differences in expression and lifestyle. I suppose that a grey line of demarcation between the vulgar on one side and the sophisticated on the other side was never drawn in caves—but I could be wrong. Did Indo-European house vulgar expressions before it branched into all those other languages?
That vulgarity is common in online forums used by both the “the educated and the uneducated” and by “the famous and the infamous” is in part the result of years of insidiousness. Think of vulgarity’s creeping into film, for example. Rhett Butler’s last words to Scarlett in Gone with the Wind contained in 1940 maybe the most shocking public use of damn: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” By comparison, that use of damn is by today’s movie standards, quite “tame.” At its worst in the twenty-first century, the word would probably elicit only the mildest of warnings to potential viewers and a rating of PG-13. Decorum ain’t what it used to be. Many film scripts are now laced with “profanities” that seem “perfectly normal” to moviegoers who consider more offensive than crude talk the use of the “wrong pronoun” or the appropriation of a culture, such as team names like “Braves,” “Indians,” “Redskins,” or “Chiefs.” Vulgar language? In an everything-goes society of feelings, vulgarity is what you say it is, but, for sure, your own vulgarity isn’t vulgar. Older “standards of decorum” always undergo change to the chagrin of elders who perceive their societal responsibility to offspring as the handing-down of culture.
With the spread of social and agenda-driven media, we have descended into an open pit of vulgarity larger than the Escondida Copper Mine. And anything, given the preferences of the “offended,” can be vulgar. No longer does one have to hide the rawest of feelings and judgments in an ironic twist that enables the vulgar to use vulgarity to condemn what they consider to be the most vulgar expressions, that is, expressions with which they disagree. Again, however, I’ll emphasize that as long as there have been “civilized” people, there has been vulgarity. My hypothesis is that since the rise of language, most have been exposed to vulgarity of one kind or another. The formalization of language after Gutenberg is what makes the endurance of the original form of curse words stand out against the changing spelling and use of all other words. How is it that the formalized language has undergone so many changes after it became codified in print whereas the vulgar words traditionally banned from print have remained largely unchanged?
Anyone who has lived a few decades doesn’t need a linguist or philologist to say that language changes all the time. “In-words” and common expressions arise with each generation. But there are exceptions to the trend of linguistic evolution: A vocabulary of enduring curse words permeates every culture’s native tongue and defies the tendency toward change (e.g., in the twentieth century drive-through became drive-thru). In contrast to the many changed words stands that ubiquitous “F” word. It first appeared in print in the early sixteenth century, indicating that it probably had a much earlier verbal appearance among the illiterate that probably made up the majority of people in pre-Gutenberg generations. Could it be that vulgarity is an inherent vice of human nature? Could William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, have been correct in saying that the only check on savagery is societal norms and that that check is weak at best?
I remember driving a two-lane road road through Amish country in eastern Ohio. My wife and I passed a barn-raising that would have made Norman Rockwell pause to paint. At least a dozen (counting is difficult at 50 mph) Amish men constructed, and as many Amish women set picnic tables while children played. We passed horse-drawn plows, women hanging clothes to dry just as so many Americans did before the invention of electric dryers, and a few people sitting on homemade porch furniture. She commented on the communal nature of their society and said as we passed their quaintness that it seemed like a society without the rush of modernism and vice, a community, she surmised, without crime. I disagreed. “They have vices,” I said, “and vulgarity.” Just moments later we passed a black Amish buggy headed in the opposite direction with two teenage boys, one of them holding the reins while the other leaned against the buggy’s back wall to hide from any passerby the cigarette he was smoking. I couldn’t resist, as you might guess. I said, “See! Humans have vices; Amish are humans; Amish have vices. I think I’ve completed my syllogism.”
Thomas Bowdler and Anthony Comstock aside, there’s little doubt that we humans have a vulgar side (major premise). People in chat rooms are humans (minor premise). People in chat rooms have a vulgar side (conclusion). Because chat rooms and comment sections are open to everyone, they are also open to use by the “vulgaris.” And even if there were societal restrictions against vulgarity—in fact, there are such rules, as movie and TV ratings attest—they would be no more effective at stopping vulgarity than gun laws are at stopping criminals from obtaining guns. The masses will be masses. And at the heart of all masses of humans lies a common thread, the potential to be vulgar that emerges in a billion conversations every day. About the only way to stop vulgarity and foster civility is by silence—a condition that isn’t feasible.
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