Last week, on campus, somebody swore at me from a distance. This happens not entirely infrequently, and usually seems deeply satisfying to its perpetrators. Who am I to stand in the way of their fun? I usually think in response. Let them holler.
All I could hear distinctly from him was the word “fuck,” which, if you ask me, was actually a demonstration of eloquence in the following way: at some point we've all had the kind of feeling aptly expressed by “fuck” in its various formulations, and he simply elected to use the corresponding language.
In the specific case of my anonymous antagonist, the motive was to express some kind of dissatisfaction with your poor, humble columnist (imagine the thought!), and in general, the locution of the subsequent utterance or thought is usually secondary to the feeling that provokes it. Now, can anyone claim to be so righteous that they've never even had a vulgar thought? Of course not, as anyone who has, for instance, ever attempted to make a left turn at the intersection of Tuttle Creek and Bluemont can attest. And furthermore, not only have we all had these thoughts, we've all voiced them, too; for some, it might come out as “darn it,” “shoot,” or some other euphemism, but the sentiment is common to us all.
So why not articulate these thoughts accordingly? It is hardly foolish or immoral to voice frustration or discontent; vulgarity for its own sake is the explicit purpose of at least some of our prohibited words, after all, and on those we ought to ignore the vacuous self-imposed ban. Now, this proposed permissibility comes with a laundry list of qualifications: moderation and diversity of vocabulary is still important, vulgar slurs and self-serving blasphemy are still probably inappropriate in almost any social context, and most of the sexual vulgarities are still somewhat socially unsuitable even in non-vulgar form. (How much more appropriate is it really in most nontechnical situations to talk of “penises” rather than “dicks?”)
Indeed, there are many prohibited vulgarities that would not benefit from the change at all, but some would, especially those that suffer from what I call, for lack of a better term, the “Voldemort effect,” an absurd kind of liminality in which the subject is permissible in conversation but the specific word denoting the subject is not. (And pardon my ignorance if there were, in fact, practical reasons why his unholy name should not be uttered.) One victim of this strange condition is “shit;” there isn't a prescriptive difference between “shit” and any of its variants, and there isn't much of a descriptive one either, other than that “crap” is acceptable, “feces” is stifled and technical, “poop” is just silly, and “shit” is vulgar and prohibited. Another example is “bitch,” which still has an important and widely used technical definition and several distinct vulgar definitions, one of which concerns the socially safe subject of crabbiness and has several synonyms that don't remove any offensiveness or intentionality from the concept but are somehow permissible (“shrew,” for instance). Stranger still is “bastard,” which has several other proper and distinct definitions, but whose unfortunate status as a vulgarity has rendered all of them unusable.
We are fortunate to speak such a vast and expressive language, and it is a gift we should not forsake, even if for all the right reasons; swearing for the sake of something else might be wrong (for a variety of reasons), but swearing for the sake of expression is sacred.
