What makes a preacher swear? You’d be surprised. I must confess to some cussing, though thankfully very few have ever heard me.
It may have started with minor hockey. When I messed the play or missed the puck, I swore to myself. (Mom always threatened to wash my mouth with soap if I ever swore out loud.)
Then I got my driver’s license. The late George Carlin, who once reveled in the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television, said: “You never really learn to curse until you learn to drive.”
Through the years as a man of the cloth, there have been occasions when even the saints could coax a bad word under my breath.
For the most part I don’t make a habit of using foul language.
But in a world where visible underwear is fashionable and simulated copulation considered cinematic excellence, it would be strange if we were upset with swearing in public.
We’ve come to accept it from all sources and sides, even elected officials. Remember Pierre Trudeau’s alleged mouthing of something like “fuddle duddle” in Parliament?
U.S. vice-president Joe Biden used an expletive in a private aside to President Obama after the health care victory — a word heard around the world thanks to a microphone and the Internet.
Why do we swear? The reasons are as varied as the vulgarity.
Like using the horn of a car, we swear to express emotion, whether rapture or irritation. In Biden’s case, profanity was an intimate private expression of excitement at an historic victory.
In Trudeau’s case it was an expression of derision for the opposition.
Sometimes we swear because we want to be heard swearing to confirm our coolness. Sometimes swearing is so habitual we don’t hear it anymore. Most often, I think we swear because the use of profanity in the moment is cathartic.
But whatever the reason, airing pungent language heretofore considered private is further evidence that the line between private and public is fast disappearing.
As taboo topics are exposed and dissected, you hear more offensive words on stage and screen than ever before. Music lyrics are not getting any cleaner.
The anonymity of voice mail, email, blogs and social networking invites profanity from those who would never use obscene language to your face.
For years, an anonymous lady would leave a string of weekly vulgar voice mail messages with tirades against me and all the corruption in the world. She never ever identified herself. I don’t miss her.
Where is all this leading? While some may think our language is more liberated, it is just courser.
We used to call profanity “colourful” language, but the same old four-letter word/s repeated ad nauseum is not much of a palette.
Jesus is quoted in Mark’s gospel as saying that “there is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him; but the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man.” (Mark 7:15) When anger consumes us and profanity pours out of us, it not only defiles us but bites us back.
As Euripides said, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make angry.”
Rather than swear at someone, I would rather insult with the poetic luster of Cyrano de Bergerac and thrust a literary lance to deflate the pompous.
These days, the object of my derision would miss the well-crafted, appropriately measured insult and would shout back more deranged invective.
I weep for our degraded dialog.
And I curse. Under my breath of course.
Bob Ripley is a retired minister who writes a column of religious comment.