This
Journal

October
1999

WARNING: Don't read this if you don't want to think about the language of certain bodily functions right now.

The way I ended yesterday's piece raised a couple of eyebrows. I know that my readership is not vast, but I'm lucky and pleased that it responds to my words in any fashion. I appreciate that. So I toned down the original post by dropping what could be seen as an inappropriate jest, given the context of the whole entry. If yesterday's entry still bothers a reader, there's not much I'm willing to do about it (aside from offering general commiseration). Bodies and language, and our feelings about them, are messy things.

Every little kid knows that a body is messy. Having had a proper middle-class upbringing, I'm as squeamish as anyone about certain things. That's probably why I sometimes go out of my way to shake things up. I hate that squeamishness in me more than I hate the mess of the body. I wonder why we can't embrace the stuff of the body, all of it, as a rich emblem of our living.

When I write or say "fart", "shit", "puke" or any number of others, I'm very conscious of being a naughty boy. We were taught not to use such language (I know the taste of Dial soap), and I think that the spirit if not the letter of that law was a good one. I don't want my daily airwaves polluted by their constant mindless repetition; I don't want my students hogtied by these simple terms that produce simplistic thought. But, that said, there is more to consider here.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition gives us this etymology: "Middle English, from Latin vulgâris, from vulgus, the common people." The dictionary (in MS Bookshelf '95) lists 865 other entries which include the term "vulgar" in some form. Many of these refer to botanical names ("Cirsium vulgare, the bull thistle") or linguistic terminology ("Vulgar Latin"), but what seems the vastest majority relate directly to matters of the body.

Consider the psychoanalytical angle: these terms refer to "dead" stuff from the body; they remind us that the entire body will one day decompose; we flee from Death and the corruption of the body and the language that brings these things to mind.

Consider the sociological angle: these terms are used by those lower classes with whom we do not wish to mingle. We are more refined, more intelligent, and smell better than they do. And here come the euphemisms. If we must speak of these things, at the very least we should use the elegant Latin or Latin-based words. So it's acceptable to speak of "excrement" or "feces" or "manure" but not of "shit". (Also a lasting effect of the Battle of Hastings - this discrimination between the upper-class, conquering Norman Latin and the common, defeated Anglo-Saxon.)

It seems that the common people have an inordinate fondness for body-talk. This is The Bawdy that we relish in Shakespeare and Rabelais and (?) Martin Scorsese. It was probably inevitable that here in the United States vulgar language would come to have a noticeably broad use and acceptance, given our anti-aristocratic roots. Up yours, King George! The Bawdy is the rich compost heap from which all art sucks nourishment. But we like it watered down, magically transformed and sanitized by the artistic processes. We want the flower, not the fertilizer.

I'm probably dragging this out too long. I've intellectualized this issue to deflect attention from myself and my own crude, coarse, common, cheap language. It is all of those things. If you know me in the real world, you know that my actual language is fairly temperate. I couldn't cuss as a kid; it took some effort to learn how to do it properly. A boy gets tired of being good all the time. This older boy still gets tired of being good all the time. Oh, the joy of simple transgressions! Poe called it The Imp of the Perverse.

I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.
Blanche DuBois