Curious Customs of a Faraway Country: Cussin’ in the ‘70s

Another transmission from that tricky, shimmering horizon called “the past.” As in, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” (L. P. Hartley.) Also, “[F]or time is the longest distance between two places.” (Tennessee Williams.) 

For most people’s lifetimes they remember their parents cussing, and profanity everywhere except maybe the Disney/ cartoon channels and the teachers at school. Up until somewhere in the 1990s this wasn’t so pervasive, even among some of the working class.

I’m old enough to remember when cussing in front of a girl shut you down forever in her graces. She’d have nothing to do with you ever again. You were common, and despite a few popular songs on the radio glorifying “the street” (urban peasants and their ways) or “the common people,” there was not one atom of dignity to being common. Just as there were “the kind of the girls you diddled and the women you married,” there were “no-account men you have nothing to do with and eligible bachelors.” Common men used coarse language among women, and were thus dismissed. 

Then, and now. Res ipsa loquitur.

Cussing among the upper classes had its place inasmuch as men would cuss around men. That was why it was called “man talk.” Neither women nor children were in the vicinity as they must not, under any circumstances, be permitted to hear such speech, let alone participate. For that matter, the language was shared among only the tightest of a man’s clique. He rarely spoke “frankly,” as the euphemism went, to outsiders.

Again, a man who cussed in front of women and children was common, and while that was certainly disqualifying, a woman who cussed was pure-T trash, no better than a whore. A man who married such a thing brought his own status down if he wasn’t already a no-account.

Calm down, ladies, I am fully aware that what passes for manhood these days is emblematic of our decline as a culture. It says much about the times that the men’s self-improvement movement which involves lifting weights, eating well, abstaining from pornography, reading classic literature and philosophy, etc., is condemned as “toxic” by men who look like this in a (largely futile) effort to bed women who look like the lower part of the previous image.

This began to change with my generation, we late-boomers born in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some of this may be blamed for the increased use of profanity in the movies, and, to a lesser extent, television—few appreciate just how serious it was to hear so much as “hell” or “damn” even in the movies until maybe 1967—and while I appreciate the influence this loosening of standards may have exercised upon people, I put a lot of the blame for the (much deserved) erosion of respect for authority occasioned by that meat-grinding money pit that was Vietnam. To rephrase one of my favorite lines, what good was all this propriety in language and manners if all it led to was young men in body bags in a southeast Asian jungle no one knew existed until so many years ago?

I must emphasize we were not griping over the war, per se. We weren’t getting drafted; we didn’t care. (It was the height of cool in the 1970s to affect an attitude of “don’t care” about pretty much everything.) It was the lesson of Vietnam that guided us, namely, that our elders, these people we were supposed to respect, even love, lied to us. They would always lie to us, waste our money, send us away to be killed while their children avoided service and were never held accountable, because, well, that’s the way of the world and you better learn your place in it, boy. 

That these hateful, hard-faced oldsters, doing Moloch’s work with Jesus on their lips, would dare tell us how to speak...yeah, well, ya know what? @#$% those smelly old hypocrites. And so it came to pass that a man who used “hell” and “damn” in casual conversation was no longer a common vulgar peasant, but a brutally honest guy tellin’ it like it is.

A play on a vulgar expression popularized among the hip-hop community in the late 1980s. The humor is in the ironically anodyne translation. Not cussing to be funny. What a twist!

One-half century later as we enter the third decade of the 21st century, we are long accustomed to adult cartoon shows in which the cartoon children drop that once most-dreaded of epithets, the legendary “f-bomb,” like it was nothing. At this point there’s no shock value to children using foul language anymore. It’s the way people talk. I’m impressed there were some people dismayed at how coarse language is celebrated on the current Star Trek series, as if that were some kind of modern artistic breakthrough. Of course, they’re dismissed as old and irrelevant, which is funny considering the star of one of these series is almost 80 and reprising a role he hasn’t played since the last movie bombed out of theaters at the turn of the century.

I used profanity quite freely in my writing, as well as real life, throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and up until about 2012, for all of the reasons described above and more. I’m not proud of it, but at least I understand why. Even now, I struggle to get the reflexive obscenities out of my speech. I have found it more difficult to quit than cigarettes. Fine. Challenge accepted.

It’s been said that if you want to be a rebel these days, don’t get a tattoo. The same can be said for what we used to call coarse language. I’ll stick it to the Man by making mine nice and smooth again.