In Defense of Profanity

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, August 24, 2023

 

With an assist from George Will, Jennifer Graham of the Deseret News takes me to task for using the word “asshole” to describe Joe Biden in a recent piece for National Review. My decision, Graham writes, was “shocking” — and, worse yet, it shocked. The term I chose, she suggests, is “more associated with road rage than the art of persuasion,” and my decision to send it out into the ether indicated that “the last tattered bastion of civility had perished in the public square.” “If a profanity falls in the forest of conservatism, and no one makes a sound,” Graham inquires rhetorically, “does that mean the battle for decorum and decency is lost?”

 

I disagree profoundly with this critique.

 

First, to the specifics. It is notable that, in order to substantiate her thesis, Graham was forced to conflate my writing with the work of other people. The hook of her essay —the first five paragraphs’ worth! — is me and my piece about President Biden. And yet, when obliged to put meat on that bone, she had no choice but to pivot elsewhere. “Conservatives from Donald Trump to Megyn Kelly to Tucker Carlson,” she writes, throw “profanity into their everyday conversation like Shriners tossing candy during a parade.” Okay. But I didn’t do that, did I? Indeed, the only reason that Graham noticed my piece in the first place was that it was atypical for me to have sworn in it — a fact that I openly acknowledged in my lengthy explanation as to exactly why I considered “asshole” to be the mot juste. Keen to establish this context, I proposed that it is sometimes necessary to dispense with the euphemisms and the politesse, to throw up one’s hands in “incredulous,” “impatient” exasperation, and to step outside of “the customs of the age.” This I then did — and deliberately so. There are tens of thousands of words in the English language, and it struck me then, as it does now, that the one I picked was the most appropriate. There is a difference between using a word rarely and premeditatively and using a word as a substitute for a universe of better options. I did the former. I have no regrets.

 

For Graham, even this was unacceptable. She has a bright line — a DMZ, if you will — and I crossed it. It’s a free country, and I respect that. But I disagree there, too. Simply put, I am not offended by swearing, and I never have been. Quoting liberally from her interview with George Will, Graham goes on to advance what she considers to be “a compelling argument why Americans should get their language out of the gutter.” Among the points she makes are that George Washington opposed “the foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing”; that profanity in journalism reflects the “wretched excess” of a freewheeling cable-news culture that “took the emancipation from regulation as a license to be emancipated from taste”; and that its use represents “laziness on the part of people expressing themselves either orally or in writing,” is “never necessary,” and is “the default position of people with impoverished vocabularies.”

 

Which, in my estimation, merely brings us back to where we started. George Will avers that it is unjustified “to resort to this kind of language, given the resources of the English language.” But, obviously, that “kind of language” constitutes a part of the remarkable “resources of the English language”; it is not distinct from it. As a matter of fact, you will find swear words in every single language that has ever been devised by man. Why? Because they serve a key communicative purpose. Because they are useful in conveying passion, contempt, enthusiasm, bewilderment, anger, and sprezzatura. Because they are cathartic. Because they transgress the thin gray lines that some would place around our public conversations and record something important about the speaker’s state of mind. Pace George Will, I do not consider myself somebody who has an “impoverished vocabulary” — and one of the reasons for that is that I wholly reject what I consider to be a set of preposterous superstitions about the correct use of the greatest language that the world has ever known. As software, English is the pinnacle: It has dispensed with pointless diacritic adornments; it does not require its users to learn whether each and every word is masculine or feminine; what it does not have, it steals whole from other dialects; it is uncommonly open to neologisms; and, sitting somewhere between the industrial functionality of German and the pretty-but-easily-flustered tones of Italian and French, it exhibits a versatility that remains unmatched. I daresay this will sound chauvinistic (there’s another word we stole unashamedly — this one from a French enemy of Britain!), but Shakespeare would not be possible in any other tongue. And Shakespeare, dear reader, loved to swear.

 

So, no: I do not believe that I erred with my “profane eruptions.” I wrote what I meant, I meant what I wrote, and I used the applicable vernacular while doing so. The English language is a magnificent weapon that, through no great achievement of my own, I have had the good fortune to find at my disposal. I refuse to spike its barrel out of fear of the occasional tut-tut.