In Defense Of Mayor Lightfoot. And Swearing As A Whole.
This morning White Sox Dave covered the latest commotion regarding Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
She said a naughty word on a hot mic. Again.
To echo Dave's sentiments, "why do people care about this?"
I know everyone expects me to pile on Mayor Lightfoot at every opportunity but I'm not that guy. I actually don't hate her. And I have common sense. As do most of us.
That said, it's 2021.
Have you seen the shit that's on TV free for all eyes, no matter the age, to view and brains to absorb?
Have you seen the things you can pull up on demand on the little device in your pocket?
You can watch real people be murdered in real-time or on-demand if you're a sick fuck that enjoys that kind of stuff. You can view it without even intending to or wanting to just by tuning in to a network news program.
You want sex? You literally can't avoid it on television, or the media anywhere. Every trash tv program is centered around it, because let's face it, it sells and puts asses in the seats. But good luck raising your kids nowadays and keeping "the discussion" planned for when they hit puberty. Zero chance kids today aren't fully schooled in fucking before the age of 12. When you do go to have the talk with them they'll probably be able to teach you a thing or two if we're being honest.
All of that said, why do we as a society still care about swearing? This is really the shit we care about?
We aren't puritans and pilgrims anymore. Faaaaaaaaaaar from it.
Why are certain words still considered "bad"?
Do we realize how outdated, and to be frank, fucking stupid, this is?
A perfect example is looking back on history at words that were considered obscene 100 years ago. No joke.
1. “Doggone it!”
2. “Shoot” or “Sugar”
3. “Holy moly”
4. “Jeez Louise!”
5. “Gosh”
6. “Dadgummit!”
7. “Oh, poop.”
8. “Jesum Crow”
9. “Fiddlesticks!”
10. “Jiminy Cricket”
11. “Heavens to Betsy!”
12. “Bull corn”
13. “Consarn”
14. “Drats!”
15. “Oh, fudge”
16. “Son of a gun”
17. “Hell’s bells”
18. Bejabbers!
19. Dad-sizzle
20. Thunderation
21. Great Horn Spoon
22. Snails!
23. G. Rover Cripes!
24. By St. Boogar and all the saints at the backside door of purgatory!
25. By the double-barrelled jumping jiminetty!
26. Odsbodikins
These were legitimately considered very bad words long ago. If you say these words today people just laugh and look at you like you stepped out of a time machine.
Here are some Olde English swear words also considered obscene -
1. Bollocks
2. Bugger
3. Bloody Hell
4. Choad
5. Crikey
6. Rubbish
7. Shag
8. Wanker
9. Twat (*WSD's personal favorite)
How are these words once deemed inappropriate any different from words we view this same way today?
Makes zero sense.
Netflix has a show on the very subject and how asinine the entire thing is. Hosted by the man Nicholas Cage
Advertisement
I don't trust people that don't swear. It's just a personal rule, and I'm not talking let the word fuck fly every other sentence or that if you don't talk like a truck driver there's something wrong with you. I'm talking about the people that stub their toe and don't swear. Or that judge you differently and whose entire attitude changes if you swear in front of them. Those people are strange and I don't trust them.
Plus, science has established that swearing is actually good for us.
National Geographic- Swearing is usually regarded as simply lazy language or an abusive lapse in civility. But as Emma Byrne shows in her book, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language, new research reveals that profanity has many positive virtues, from promoting trust and teamwork in the office to increasing our tolerance to pain.
There’s great research coming out of Australia and New Zealand, which is perhaps not surprising, that says that jocular abuse, particularly swearing among friends, is a strong signal of the degree of trust that those friends share. When you look at the transcripts of these case studies of effective teams in sectors like manufacturing and IT, those that can joke with each other in ways that transgress polite speech, which includes a lot of swearing, tend to report that they trust each other more.
One of the reasons why there’s probably this strong correlation is that swearing has such an emotional impact. You’re demonstrating that you have a sophisticated theory of mind about the person that you’re talking to, and that you have worked out where the limit is between being shocking enough to make them giggle or notice you’ve used it but not so shocking that they’ll be mortally offended. That’s a hard target to hit right in the bullseye. Using swear words appropriate for that person shows how well you know them; and how well you understand their mental model.
Also, it's in our nature. Since we were apes. No bullshit.
Out in the wild, chimps are inveterate users of their excrement to mark their territory or show their annoyance. So the first thing you do, if you want to teach a primate sign language, is potty train them. That means, just like human children at a similar age, that they end up with a taboo around excrement. In Project Washoe, the sign for “dirty” was bringing the knuckles up to the underside of the chin. And what happened spontaneously, without the scientists teaching them, was that the chimps started to use the sign for “dirty” in exactly the same way as we use our own excremental swear words.
Washoe was a female chimpanzee that was originally adopted by R. Allen Gardner and Beatrix T. Gardner in the 1960s. Later, she was taken on by a researcher in Washington State called Roger Fouts. Washoe was the matriarch to three younger chimps: Loulis, Tatu, and Dar. By the time they brought in Loulis, the youngest, the humans had stopped teaching them language, so they looked to see if the chimps would transmit language through the generations, which they did.
Washoe and the other chimps would sign things like “Dirty Roger!” or “Dirty Monkey!” when they were angry. The humans hadn’t taught them this! What had happened is that they had internalized that taboo, they had a sign associated with that taboo, so all of a sudden that language was incredibly powerful and was being thrown about, just like real excrement is thrown about by wild chimpanzees.
Wall St Journal actually did a great deep dive into the "Evolution of Profanity" and wouldn't you know, it was a "class" thing. The rich nobles were "horrified" by the language by the poor working plebes so they went out of their way to use "proper" language to further distance themself from the poors.
WSJ - Obviously, it was people of a certain class who most avoided profanity in these times. Novelist Frances Trollope was appalled at the amount of cursing she heard among working people when she toured America in the 1820s. At the turn of the 20th century, a slang dictionary notes that the F-word was already in widespread use, although we hardly know it from anything anyone put in writing at the time. In the early 20th century, a cigar-chomping man-of-the-people sort like journalist H.L. Mencken freely used the term euphemized as SOB among friends, despite never venturing it in his newspaper columns.
Still, a sense reigned that one kept the “bad words” out of polite society. The same year that Ginger Rogers was substituting tummy for belly on Broadway, Cole Porter put the SOB term into a song lyric sung by a woman in “Gay Divorce”—but with the joke that when the singer uttered the final word in the expression, a drum smack from the pit drowned her out. Certain proprieties were assumed in public settings.
So in closing, I think we need to come together as a society, and say fuck it to giving a fuck about swearing.
There are much bigger fish to fry.
I really really really wish George Carlin were still alive today. Guy was SO before his time.
Advertisement
p.s. - did a "Watch This When You're High" that has some good videos on it
p.p.s.- I've said it before in blogs but I really don't hate Mayor Lightfoot. She ran on a platform for change. She was an outsider that had good intentions to break up the systemic corruption in city hall and get Chicago back on track integrity-wise. Has that happened? Ha. No. But I also realize she had a near-impossible job made even harder by the pandemic. That said, she's in way over her head and hasn't really done much to help her situation. Quite the opposite. But I'm still hopeful. She's passionate (as this and other incidents have demonstrated). She cares and I think she means well.
p.p.p.s. - if not for nothing this blog supplied a good amount of words/terms I think you can get to slip by the dad-sizzle comment section sensors.