The shock
value of all our 4-letter words has come a long way since I grew up in my staid
little community in my prairie hometown—come a long way down to nearly not
shocking at all. In many of the current films, the language is as blue as the
deep blue sea and can desensitize the ears to the point that viewers almost no
longer even hear the Anglo-Saxonisms.
When I grew up, there were almost no
f-words and certainly no m-f-words. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield tried to scrub
away that one little f-word so that his sister wouldn’t see it, and The Catcher in the Rye was banned for
years and years from public and high school libraries. The most titillating thing
I ever read was from a book published in 1933, with that infamous page 69 in Erskine
Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre. I and
my lascivious buddies had to read it surreptitiously for fear of any adult
catching us at it. But when I read it now, I realize how innocent it was, how
innocent I was.
Another
example of my age of innocence is the time when I, about ten-years-old, gave my
sister a middle finger. She slapped me so hard I thought my head would come
off, screaming at me, “Don’t you know what that means?” I blubbered that no, I
didn’t know what it meant, just that it meant something insulting. “Well,” she
told me, “it means something really bad and don’t ever do that again.” And I
didn’t, at least not for quite a few years.
Later, when I was in army basic
training, then an older, more sophisticated but still linguistically innocent 18-year-old,
I first heard the m-f-word and my brain buzzed at its awfulness. How could
anyone, anyone, ever say such a thing about one’s mother?
When I was a young lad, I and my home-towners
were so loathe to use such language that we couldn’t even tolerate visually
referring to anything pertaining to the human anatomy or bodily functions. Boxes
of Kotex were wrapped in plain brown paper before they were put on grocery or
drug store shelves. We even called them sanitary pads, and heaven help those
who might consider a tampon and the ill-considered way it would be used. Even
menstruation had to be called a period, like a unit of time, in this case a girl’s
monthly visitation by some old lady. Some, though, more lewdly called it “Aunt
Flo,” more crudely called it “got the rag on.”
For the main bodily functions, we
considered the Latin acceptable—defecation, urination, flatulence, and
copulation. But we also resorted to cuteness and euphemisms. Take urination,
for example. In my family, we called it “to squizzle.” As far as I know, this was
strictly a term of my mother’s and that we’ve always been the only ones who
called it that. She may have sort of got it from “squirt,” which describes male
urination, and “splash,” more female descriptive. Others, in other parts and
other times, have come up with equally innocent ways to avoid burning little
ears: from softest and safest to more and more lewd (and, or, comical)—to tinkle,
pee, go pee pee, wet, piddle, go number one—all labels for either sex—and, more
crude, making them more masculine—to take a leak, piss, drain the lizard, and
(my favorite of all) shake hands with the president.
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