Of Fists and F-bombs
Dear Reader,
Cuss words should have a certain logic to them; they can act as emotional and social brakes, but use them like commas and they lose their power.
We live in an era where nothing is off-limits and everything is expressed at maximum volume. But a culture that abandons restraint in language often ends up with restraint in nothing.
If politics is the contest over power. If it is concerned with who gets it, how it is used, and to what end. And if it involves the organization of people into groups, the making of collective decisions, and the enforcement of those decisions through laws, institutions, and, when necessary, force. The politics requires a language informs, moderates and smooths the process of decision making. Not euphemism, you want candor, words have to contribute something. What we call swear words can contribute, under the right conditions. When a society is properly sensitive to them.
The utility of some vulgarity, when used correctly, is like that of a signal flare, rare, urgent, unmistakable. Use it all the time, and it becomes distorted white noise, noticed and swiftly blocked out of your senses. Background and filler. You need language that is reserved for moments of critical problems, breakdowns, or emergencies. You need a verbal red light.
Language that is inappropriate to use with strangers or only in intimate spaces serves a social function—it tells us where we are, how close we are, and what the stakes are. If you have ever heard the phrase “watch your mouth,” that is old cultural policing and boundary setting. The power of certain words came from their scarcity and their risk. To swear was at once to step outside the bounds of overt official civility, and therefore to signal danger, deep familiarity, or deep disrespect. Without that framework, the words just float—stripped of shock, of precision, of meaning. If cussing becomes trite you have lost the plot. -reader you may insert jokes about sailors here-
