Everything makes a difference – sometimes imperceptively on the sub atomic level, sometimes with broad global ramifications. The decision to take anti-oxidants last year may have stopped a tiny cancer process in one cell in your stomach. The decision to appoint Hitler as Chancellor by von Hindenberg in 1933 caused worldwide suffering.
Language has many purposes. It is used to communicate facts and opinions, compliments and insults. Virtuallly all languages have built-in
structures to express respect. Titles. Mr. Smith, Dr. Brown, professor
Jones, general Black, reverend Bush, father Furgusson, officer Blake, your honor, your highness. If your child is in the hospital, you address the doctor as Dr. Jones. If you were to say, “Hey Jones, what is your prognosis? How long will Billy have to stay here?”, you may convey a lack of respect for his station. Dr Jones may be slightly less likely to give the same deference to your son, Billy.
Another structure present in virtually all languages is what anthropology calls forbidden words. In the vernacular: profanity, curse words, obsenities, expletives, swearing or foul language. Forbidden words have a multitude of uses.
They are used by an in-group among themselves where they wouldn’t use them publicly to define an identifiction. On my dormitory floor in college, we all used profanities fluidly. it was sort of a bonding mechanism. ”My goddam prof gave us 30 fucking pages of reading.”
Secondly they are used to convey respect by not using them in many situations. The same college student goes to a History discussion class and refrains from using the forbidden words that are de riguer back in the dorm. They would be out of place, and convey disrespect. If a pastor gave a sermon and said, “Theres’s too much fucking sin in the world” it would likely be deemed inapproprite and disrespectful- breaking the taboo of forbidden words. And thus the respect for the pastor may diminish.
In 1972 Comedian George Carlin had a comedy routine where he identified the 7 words you cannot say on TV: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, motherfucker, cocksucker, and tits. He was arrested for breaking obscenity laws. The case was dismissed but later the case went to the Supreme Court when a radio station broadcast the Carlin sketch. SCOTUS ruled that the Federal Communications commision could sanction broadcasters for airing inappropriate material. But the decision was accompanied by subjective definitions that attempted to define speech that was indecent, but not obscene, protected by the first ammendment, or “patently obscene,” which is not protectected. It asserted that speech that was merely indecent, (and, in turn, indecent defined as inappropriate for minors) could be broadcast only at certain times of the day. And that “patently obscene” could not be broadcast at all. Of course all this meant not only that all these terms were debatable, but the passage of time changed the words that fell into each catagory. Since Carlin, the word piss, as in pissed off is a regular staple of even buttoned-down news shows.
The hard sciences are concerned with hard concepts: light, heat, energy, gravity, wave, particle, distance, speed, time, and others. There are other real concepts which effect daily life that are only considered scientifically by the social sciences. Fear, hate, motivation, gratification, structural violence, love, learn, and respect. And a recent one, structural fear, which means fear propagated by demagoguery to compel a target audience to support a leader. Typically a population is made to be fearful that if a leader is not elected, the country will be thrown into war or inundated by rising crime. Many people speak casually about what they think of these concepts but it is left to the social sciences to speak of them with operational definitions and determine the the interaction and impact of these concepts on the society.
Once a student of mine said, scornfully, that just because he saw a murder on TV doesn’t mean he would go out and commit murder.
For most people this is true, but the social sciences have massive amounts of scientifically attained research showing that, indeed, mass media has enormous influence on human behavior. The Bandura experiments showed how groups of young children reacted more violently across several measures, including hitting a plastic punching bag, than the control group after watchining a more violent video than the control group. And, rarely, the effects have an immediate, striking impact. The film”The Boys Next Door” showed teens, trying to impress, made the stunt of lying down on the line in the middle of the road, letting cars pass by on both sides. Within a week, in 2 different incidences, two youth were killed after trying the stunt in real life, on a real highway, and the film was shelved.
A society, at any given time, has its own tacit rules of what speech is acceptable and when. In 1940 the classic film Gone with the Wind was
made. A minor scandal was caused when the producers decided to include the later famous line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Such a word had never been spoken in a public medium. The producer David Selznick, was fined $5000, but the line was subsequently allowed in the film. But why? Why are there forbidden words? Again it is a device arising out of culture, a device to maintain a level of respect in the society – respect that reaches across differences. And this is a quintessential element of forbidden words, as well as titles – to generate respect across barriers, personalities, ethnicities, ages, religions. We use titles for people who are opposite politically, ethnically, regionally. Societal respect. A reflection that we all benefit from the sacrafices, accomplishments, and diligence of the many who came before us and helped build our society.
So why do the forbidden words become no longer forbidden and what are the effects of the process? The most overwhelming driver of the process is, of course, the media, and its go-to phenomenon that substitutes for great writing – voyeurism. Violence, along with sex is the required voyeuristic formula for modern TV dramas. And violent, abusive, language is, of course, mandatory.
screenply…??? eloquent, forceful, dramatic, convincing, and entertaining without erroding the purpose of the taboo on forbidden words.
Media shows a US president who is patently, and unabashedly dishonest in House of Cards, a vice president of the US who is cynical and disingenuous (as all of her co-workers are) in the show VP, a former teacher who is in the glamorous, exciting business of drug smuggling in Breaking Bad and the Sopranos, the also-glamorous mafia family. And we shouldn’t omit the glamorous violence of every episode of Game of Thrones.
What is role model?
