Stop Cursing

With the disclaimer that I am certainly not the one to lecture on the subject, I don’t like cursing. Yes, occasionally some four-letter words fall out of my mouth. This is usually in the company of very close friends, not too flagrant, and never in public or around elders.

Growing up, I remember cursing (or at least trying to curse). It was the forbidden fruit for my cousins and I. But it was always in a “scared to get caught” hushed tone. Regardless of the intrigue, we knew it was wrong. Disrespect, cursing, and rap (with curse words) were banned at home and our extended family. I remember getting popped by my mother when I yelled out an expletive after slamming by finger in the car door at age 14.

But the acceptability of cursing today has well-infiltrated popular culture and mainstream media. Children (at least the ones on the Metro or walking through my neighborhood) curse loudly with no sense of awkwardness, shame, or care. Hip hop doesn’t help, and cursing its even bleeding into R&B. Even more frustrating is that the girls are as bad as the boys. The last remnants of social decorum and femininity (completely lost on me growing up) has completely evaporated.

Jim Watkins, writing for The Huffington Post, underscore a similar point of view riding the New York subway:

I’ve been called many things, especially since I began blogging. But I’ve never been called a prude. So my choice of a topic today surprises even me a little bit, but it’s something that bugs me more and more. I’m talking about the increasing, indiscriminate, and casual use of loud and graphic profanity in public… profanity that is spoken–often yelled–with no regard to who might be hearing it; not young children, not elderly people, not anybody. And I’m not talking here about “hell” and “damn.”

….

As time goes by, I’m becoming convinced that this approach of mine to “contained” swearing is rather quaint, if not downright old-fashioned. In a place like New York City, where people are packed together so closely that private conversations can become community events, I see very little concern about having bad language overheard. Quite the contrary; every day I hear the most vile swear words basically being announced in public. If you ride commuter or subway trains, you know what I’m talking about, especially if you ride them at night like I do. Groups of young people flood onto the trains, often after drinking, and you would swear you’d stumbled into a longshoreman’s convention. And not just young people; beered-up sports fans riding home from a game are ‘effing this and m-’effing all along the line, with no thought to the people around them who have to breathe in all that blue air. I wish I could say it’s mostly guys are who doing it, but I can’t. My anecdotal evidence is that women, younger women especially, are spewing these words as much or more than their male counterparts.

….

I realize, of course, that there’s nothing to be done about this. Public coarseness gets worse with every passing decade. But maybe if one or two people who read this think twice next time before making imposing their bad language on innocent or unwilling ears nearby, I suppose that’s something.

We can only hope.

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