Saints and Sinners: Vulgarities uttered at every turn
“Darn it!”
When was the last time you heard anybody say that? You’ve heard (bleep) and (bleep) and (bleep) and maybe have used those four-letter words yourself, but “darn” went out of style years ago when a tide of profanity began engulfing our culture.
It’s hard to believe that “darn” was considered a swear word. There is a comedy by Cal Stewart on an old Victrola record I have, called “Uncle Josh and Aunt Nancy Put Up the Kitchen Stove.”
He wants to go fishing, she wants him to put up the stove. Finally, Uncle Josh says, “All right, if somebody will help me, I’ll put up the darned old stove.”
Aunt Nancy replies, “I’ll help you, but you needn’t swear about it.”
Some folks might be right when they say they see nothing awfully wrong with swearing. But can’t the decline of standards and the virtual disappearance of taste in our society be traced to this habit of ours to accept anything so long as there is nothing “awfully wrong” about it?
The fact that there is nothing “awfully wrong” with a thing doesn’t mean it is elevating, and until we become more concerned than we currently are with elevating our speech and actions, our civilization will continue to decline.
What is relatively recent with swearing is that women now swear as much as men and men swear in front of women. Women got to swearing in earnest, I believe, as a result of the feminist movement. Anything men could do, women could do, including take up this vulgar habit. On top of that, any man who would swear in front of other men but not in the presence of a woman was accused of being sexist.
Another relatively recent development is swearing in movies and on television. Vulgarity and obscenity in these two mediums has reached the point where the “C” word (censorship) is again being heard in the land.
The Legion of Decency, the morals watchdog of the Catholic Church, was primarily responsible for imposing censorship on the movies. Founded in 1934 by the Catholic Bishops of the United States, every film that came out of Hollywood had to pass the cleanliness test. Hollywood adhered to these guidelines from the legion’s inception to the mid-1960s when, after years of diminishing authority, the organization loosened its grip on the movie industry.
Vulgarity of even the mildest sort drew a no-no from the guardians of the country’s morals. When the script for the movie version of “Born Yesterday” (1950) called for Brock, the junk dealer tycoon played by Broderick Crawford, to belch, the censors let out a loud noise of their own: “Eliminate the burp from Brock.” It was cut.
But even before the Legion of Decency, in the face of organized boycotts by Catholic moviegoers, the film heads formed their own censorship organization to police what came out of Hollywood. In 1922, they organized the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and named William H. Hays as their president with all the powers of a censor.
As president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America from 1922 to 1945, Hays administered the motion-picture moral code (popularly called the “Hays Code”).
The 1930s, when the studios raised the cry that they were being forced to operate under impossibly restrictive moral standards, turned out to be Hollywood’s “golden years.”
Would censorship today bring back those golden years?
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)