From Fresh Air from WHYY, on National Public Radio
Swearing: A Long And #%@&$ History
By Geoff Nunberg
Sometimes it's small government you need to keep your eye on. Take Middleborough, Mass., whose town meeting recently imposed a $20 fine for swearing in public. According to the police chief, the ordinance was aimed at the crowds of unruly teenagers who gathered downtown at night yelling profanities at people, not just someone who slams a finger in a car door. But whatever the exact idea was, nobody thought it was a good one. The ordinance had the rare distinction of being denounced by Fox News commentators, the editorial writers at the Washington Post, and the director of the Massachusetts ACLU. There are some people who want to keep government out of the marketplace and some people who want it kept out of the bedroom, but pretty much everybody's spooked at having it police what we say to the neighbor who starts his leaf blower at 7:15 on a Sunday morning....
This is an old tune. Social critics in the 1940s railed at the unchecked profanity of the returning GI's. In the '20s they were lambasting the vogue for four-letter words among the society slummers called mucker posers, the well-bred young people who felt the need "to emulate the manners and language of the longshoreman," as one critic put it. And so on down to the Victorians, whose sermons and statutes were full of references to public profanity and so on....