[This leads to] another mystery about swearing: the bizarre number of different ways in which we swear. There is cathartic swearing, as when we slice our thumb along with the bagel. There are imprecations, as when we offer advice to someone who has cut us off in traffic. There are vulgar terms for everyday things and activities, as when Bess Truman was asked to get the president to say fertilizer instead of manure and she replied, "You have no idea how long it took me to get him to say manure." There are figures of speech that put obscene words to other uses.
And the conclusion:
When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration, meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our attitudes, both thinkable and unthinkable. It engages the full expanse of the brain: left and right, high and low, ancient and modern. Shakespeare, no stranger to earthy language himself, had Caliban speak for the entire human race when he said, "You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse."
Maybe swearing intrigues me because its very use implies the existence of the divine and morals (Eliot, in After Strange Gods, laments a culture in which blasphemy is not even possible, because there is no divine left to blaspheme). Perhaps I am fascinated because swearing is an expression of passionate extremes in highs and lows, which are discouraged by a culture that would like to make our expressions exactly even, cutting off high highs and low lows and making everything a boring grey mediocrity of expression. Or maybe I simultaneously enjoy the fact that society respects certain customs and enjoy my own prerogative to break those customs.
No comments:
Post a Comment