President’s slip a sign of the times?

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July 27, 2006

Anonymous The Corsicana Daily Sun Thu Jul 27, 2006, 04:36 PM CDT

Write with the learned, pronounce with the vulgar. — Benjamin Franklin

The one thing about the English language is its complexity. New immigrants almost always have difficulty in using the correct word in context. It’s no wonder, then, that the first and easiest to understand are cuss words. For some reason the use of such phrases are simpler to grasp. Perhaps it’s because they are easier to directly translate into the speaker’s native tongue.

Along a similar vein I know you know of toddlers who can barely mutter “Mama” and “Daddy” come out with a clearly verbalized “dirty word.” The story in my family is I broke my Mema from saying a certain word after she heard me use it in a sentence. “And he used it in the right place, too,” so I was told.

Yeah, I know, gentle reader, how strongly people react negatively to the vulgarities spouted off in their presence, and how prevalent the practice appears to be today. In simpler times the use of foul language was considered a sign of poor breeding. Many experts said such limited command of a person’s vocabulary revealed limited intellectual skills.

But times change and people change. In the ’70s the comedian George Carlin had a bit about “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.” I think now the list has either been totally eliminated or reduced to a couple of them. Before him, Lenny Bruce was arrested numerous times during the late ’50s and early ’60s for using off-color language in his stage act. The onset of cable and more intense theatrical films have exposed us to more explicit uses of formerly taboo words in the last 20 years, and is accepted in some circles as normal communication.

Anyway, dealing with these sensibilities I suppose it wasn’t a surprise to hear the recent outcry over President Bush’s remarks to British Prime Minister Tony Blair at a summit to discuss the Middle East powder keg. He apparently thought the microphone was off and felt free to let his frustration with the process be known to a friend: “See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this (mess) and it’s over.”

Short memory has faded over the fact Vice President Cheney told a senator to do something physically impossible some years ago, caught on tape by a nearby reporter.

While some are always taken aback that our high officials would lower themselves to the use of gutter verbiage, the unfortunate “open mike” has caught the famous and not-so-famous in embarrassing situations over the years. During the heyday of radio a popular kids’ show host gave his usual closing farewell. Thinking he was off the air he remarked, “Are we off? Good! That ought to hold the little (expletive)!” You guessed it — millions heard the rant.

There are many other examples, but I think you get the idea. We are human, thus certain frustrations tend to boil to the surface and come out when we think the general populace is out of earshot. Sometimes “darn,” “heck” and “shoot” just don’t cut it when faced with a certain situation.

—————

Ken Hall is a Daily Sun columnist. His column appears Sundays and Thursdays. He may be reached via e-mail at kendubh1@hotmail.com.

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