One Man’s Vulgarity, Another Man’s Lyrics

Brian Balogh: All right, Joanne and Nathan. We heard earlier in the show about comedian Lenny Bruce. So, how about some more comedy?

Nathan Connolly: Yes.

Joanne Freeman: I’m in.

Brian Balogh: Okay. Here’s writer Melissa Moore with a joke.

Melissa Moore: It’s about a man who is overseas and he comes back to his family, and his family asks, “Well, how was it? How was your tour?” And he’s been fighting in World War II and it’s been terrible, honestly. He’s seen all these people die, he’s seen starvation, he’s seen just the most horrible things. But it’s his grandma asking and he doesn’t want to tell her about this, so he says, “Well, the boys sure were funny, Grandma. They just told a lot of good jokes.” And his family says, “Oh, tell us one, tell us one.” And he says, “Well, gosh, I don’t know if I can tell you one, because the boys also used a lot of bad language.” And then they say, “Okay, well, just say … If you come to a bad word, just say blank. Just skip it, say blank, and then tell us the joke.”

Melissa Moore: And he says, “Okay, okay, I’ll do that.” So he starts telling his joke and he says, “Blank, blank, blank, blankety-blank, blank, blanking, blanking, blank, blank, blank, blankety-blank, blank, blank, fuck.”

Brian Balogh: Here’s more again on why she gets a laugh out of that.

Melissa Moore: Oh, I just love the idea that there are worse words than fuck. What are all these words that he’s got in there that have more power than fuck?

Brian Balogh: Joanne, Nathan, wanna take any guesses at what the other words might be?

Joanne Freeman: Gosh darn it.

Nathan Connolly: Doggone, dagnabit.

Brian Balogh: Did you both go to Catholic schools? But look, that’s as good a guess as any.

Joanne Freeman: So, in reality, this joke features a soldier coming back from World War II with a foul mouth. And I’m guessing this was a pretty common thing for soldiers, to bring back the colorful language heard in their barracks.

Brian Balogh: You got it, Joanne. A few years ago, Moore published a book about the history of swearing. And she says that during the 20th Century, the two world wars punctuated a rise in profanity.

Melissa Moore: The language of soldiers when they came back home after World War I and World War II, they really brought swearing into the public discourse in a way that it hadn’t been before. So in the Victorian Period, there were lots of people saying fuck and fucking, but it really was not at all present in public discourse. It was extremely taboo.

Melissa Moore: And when you get people coming back from World War I, they would write memoirs and they’d use some of this language that they were using on the battlefield in their memoirs. Especially after World War II, you’s get reporters who are really trying to give people a flavor of what it was like. And what it was like was a lot of bad language.

Brian Balogh: Do you have any sense of what the response on the home front was when these soldiers started coming back and cursing like soldiers?

Melissa Moore: I think at first, it was a little bit of denial, not wanting to accept that this is what the language was. And so the very first memoirs have all the curse words bleeped out. Or, they have kind of commentary saying, “Oh, well, this language. Although this is the language they were using, oh my goodness, this is horrible. How could this be?” But then going on and printing.

Melissa Moore: So Norman Mailer had wrote a memoir in 1948. He’s got a tremendous number of fucks in there, but he spells it fug, F-U-G. People attribute it to different people, but Tallulah Bankhead, she was famously quipped when she met him, “Oh, you’re the man who can’t spell fuck.”

Brian Balogh: Now look, jokes and memoirs weren’t the only way soldiers expressed their vulgar vocabulary.

Melissa Moore: This is a popular song from World War II, that expresses a lot of the feelings of helplessness, but also rage that soldiers would have, stuck in this bureaucracy, seeing all these horrible things, participating in all these incredibly difficult things. And it’s called Fuck Them All. And it goes, I’m a terrible singer, but it goes basically, “Fuck them all, fuck them all, the long and the short and the tall. You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean, so cheer up my lads, fuck them all.” That’s part of the chorus.

Joanne Freeman: Kind of zingy.

Brian Balogh: Speechless.

Nathan Connolly: He’s worried his 7th grade teacher is coming out from behind the curtain.

Brian Balogh: So I’ll admit that when I first heard the “blankety-blank” joke from earlier, I thought about another 20th Century comedian who is notorious for his language. George Carlin.

Nathan Connolly: Oh, yeah, the master.

Joanne Freeman: Aha.

Brian Balogh: So, I asked Moore where Carlin fits into all of this when he starts to take the stage in the 1960’s and 70’s.

Melissa Moore: Yeah, that was an interesting time, because the sort of counterculture of the 60’s, in a way, he sort of finished off what the greatest generation started. The people coming back, the soldiers coming back, brought this language into the public sphere and then in the 60’s and 70’s, it really started becoming more prevalent. And so, George Carlin for example, had his seven words you can’t say on television, which are, let’s see, let me count. Shit, piss, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. And tits is sort of throw in there, it seems to me, as slightly a little bit of an afterthought.

Melissa Moore: But so, he had this monologue and he in 1973, a public radio station was playing the monologue in the afternoon and a father was listening to it in the car and heard it with his son and he complained to the FCC, saying, “Oh, my gosh. I don’t want to be just listening to the radio and hear stuff like this.”

Brian Balogh: Right.

Melissa Moore: So this became a court case that went to the Supreme Court. Can the FCC regulate this kind of language? Because it’s very clear in American Law that the FCC can regulate obscenity, but this was something different. This was called indecency. And really indecency is language that depicts things in an offensive way, and it basically regulates swearing. So, could the FCC regulate swearing?

Melissa Moore: And the Supreme Court in 1978 decided that, yes, the FCC could ban these words on TV and on the radio, because they’re kind of broadcast into your homes and it’s harder to avoid them.

Brian Balogh: Which of course gave Carlin’s monologue a whole new life.

Melissa Moore: Yes, yes, and so, people still kind of … It’s still sort of a touch stone, because now you can go back and think, “Well, what … Can we still not say these words on TV?” Well, no. Now we can say-

Brian Balogh: Yeah, it became iconic. Now, the Supreme Court came down differently in a case called Cohen v. California. Can you tell us about that case?

Melissa Moore: Oh, yeah. That was another interesting one about swearing, where Paul Robert Cohen went into a Municipal Court, I believe in California, and he had a jacket on. And written on the back of his jacket, he had put, “Fuck the draft.”

Brian Balogh: This was at the height of the Vietnam War. I think he wore this jacket in 1968 and then the Supreme Court ruled in 1971.

Melissa Moore: That’s correct, yeah. The court case was decided in 1971. And yeah, so he went in there and he was arrested for disturbing the peace with offensive conduct. People thought, “Oh, my gosh. He can’t do this. This is offensive to all of the people fighting in Vietnam.” And so, he was arrested. But and this case also went to the Supreme Court. They came to a very different conclusion. They decided that this was protected speech, that the First Amendment of the Constitution says that when possible, you shouldn’t abridge people’s Freedom of Speech.

Melissa Moore: Courts traditionally have been quite lenient about what you should be able to say. They try not to circumscribe what people can say, and in this case, they decided that, “Well, fuck the draft, it is meaningful speech. He’s communicating how much he hates the draft.” And what’s important is that it was a, what the law calls a fighting word. So, fighting words are words that kind of by their very utterance inflict harm or they are liable to kind of immediately incite a breach of the peace.

Melissa Moore: And so, Justice Harlan who wrote the opinion has this wonderful line where he says, “One man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric.” And he says, “Well, if you try to make public discourse so pristine that no one could be offended, no one’s ever gonna say anything, because people get offended and that’s part of having a robust public sphere.”

Brian Balogh: It seems like we see a lot more First Amendment Constitutional cases around language in the 20th Century. The First Amendment is called the First Amendment because it’s been there for a long time. I mean, what is changing in the 20th Century?

Melissa Moore: I think they are a result partly of the swear words coming into the public discourse and people just hearing them in places they didn’t before. And some people being comfortable with this language and using it and some people going, “Oh, my God. I can’t hear that.” And so, then you get the legal cases.

Brian Balogh: Well, I know why I swear, but I’m curious to know why people more generally swear, and whether that reason has changed over history.

Melissa Moore: I think the reason has been the same, even though the words have changed, in that swear words are kind of the best words we have to express extreme emotion. Because they basically are kind of stored and processed differently in the brain, and they’re more closely connected to our emotions. And so, I think while in the Middle Ages, you might have said, “God’s bones,” when you were really angry or really happy, you were doing it for the same reason that somebody today says, “Fucking,” again for joy or for pain or for anger, all these emotions are very well expressed by swear words.

Brian Balogh: Yet, when you characterize swearing among soldiers, you talk about swearing being so common, that actually if you really wanted to get someone’s attention, you didn’t swear. I think the example you use is, “Get your fucking rife, get your fucking rifle.” When someone said, “Get your rifles,” that was serious. Do we risk losing swearing’s special place by it becoming so common?

Melissa Moore: I mean, I think we are seeing the decline of the sort of sexual and certainly the excremental words. So, I think shit now is much less powerful than it was in the Victorian Era. Fuck is getting less powerful. And then eventually, once it gets these very different uses, it gets used more commonly and then the power goes down, because you just hear it so often. But I mean, I’m not worried about swearing in general, because I think we’ll come up with … We’re gonna come up with some new words.

Brian Balogh: The last time you dropped a hammer on your toe, what did you say?

Melissa Moore: Probably motherfucker. Sorry.

Brian Balogh: It’s all right.

Brian Balogh: Melissa Moore is the author of the book Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing.