by Since, as a Presbyterian, I am a genuine puritan and Rob is only a pretender, I thought I’d weigh in on the Vice-President’s “hot mike” problem.
One of the reasons language like the Vice-President’s is unfortunate is that it has a coarsening effect. I don’t just mean that we all get used to hearing things that ought to offend us, though that is certainly true. An equally significant problem is that such language is coarsening in the sense that it substitutes for articulate speech. In this sense, the Vice-President might just as well have whispered “Party on, Garth” into the President’s ear.
There are at least a couple of problems with the latter sort of coarsening. First, we may not know exactly what the speaker is saying. When the Vice-President used the f-word and the phrase “big deal,” did he mean (1) “We are participating in an event of profound historical importance”, (2) “This was a great political victory for us Democrats” or (3) “We are powerful, important people”?
I suspect that he meant (1), perhaps with a little bit of (3) thrown in— the f-bomb providing some macho swagger. I don’t doubt Mr Biden’s capacity to speak in an articulate fashion when he needs to (though perhaps I should), but I do wonder about what effect speaking this way on a regular basis might have on a person’s capacity to express himself/herself clearly.
When my students use inappropriate language in class (no one has used the f-word yet), I always complain, but not about the language as such. I just ask the students whether the offending phrase was the most articulate statement they could come up with. This usually elicits some giggling from the other students and gets the point across. Dude!
Bill, you’re fleeing from your Puritan roots! If Biden said to Obama, “Party on, dude!” when he introduced him, we’d all roll our eyes and say, “what a dumb thing to say.” My question is whether we lose something as a society when the f-bomb becomes simply a dumb thing to say, rather than a thing we just do not say. Does society need a zone of forbidden words?
I didn’t mean to suggest that the words weren’t offensive in their own right, just that they were dumb (and dumbing-down) in addition to being offensive. I suspect that the acceptability of such words in our society is somehow related to a widespread loss of the fear of God.