I hesitate (barely) to include Mark Edmundson’s Sept. 14th essay in The New York Times as another example—my ongoing distraction—of that daily newspaper’s ascent to an evolving parody print/digital entity. That’s because his condescending, classist “Why Does Everybody Swear All The Time Now? appears, at first reading, as a huffy lament about his late-age discovery that vulgarity is today as common as people lazily using the words “quite literally” or “deeply disturbing” either out of sheep mentality or an unconscious (I’m generous) attempts to sound “fancy.” After a second go-round I still wasn’t sure, but if it was parody then congratulations to the Times for upping their game.
He’s a sly one, that Mr. Edmundson, 73, Yale-educated, professor at the University of Virginia, author of 15 books and contributor to a number of “socially acceptable” periodicals. But here’s the first clue: “When I was growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s, swearing was the undisputed territory of guys. Guys who worked with their hands—construction men, plumbers and carpenters—cursed copiously on the job… Sometimes a neighborhood dad would let loose a stream of bad words from the backyard when he was three beers in, but not often.”
According to our moral superior, it was only men who swore in the mid-20th century, and those who “worked with their hands.” Not even a year ago, before the Times transitioned, that sniffy idea would’ve been struck off by an offended copy editor (likely a female intern from Yale) as demeaning to the lower- and middle-classes, the guys who were taught in “the school of hard knocks,” and possibly construed as thinly-veiled criticism of those rough-and-tumble, Jimmy Hoffa-championing union members. Never mind that well-known writers (Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Raymond Carver, John Rechy, Allen Ginsberg, D.H. Lawrence and William Burroughs, etc.) and filmmakers routinely used profanity, for to ignore such language was masking the reality of American life and culture.
He continues, jumping the “they worked with their hands” 1960s to 2025: “Now we live in a cacophony of curses. People curse on the job, no matter how white their collars. Kids now swear as well as the mythical swearing sailors of my youth… Compulsive vulgarity—talking dreck all the time—gives evidence of a troubled view of life and spreads it… When you use everyone’s favorite vulgar word to denote the sexual act, you reduce the act. You gut the spirit life out of it.”
I’ve rarely—aside from what’s considered reputable political commentary today, which is obscene on its own level—read anything so ridiculous. Is Edmundson saying that if a person uses the word “fuck” a lot, like most people I’ve known since I was 14, he or she doesn’t like to fuck, screw, eat pussy or suck cock, believes the “act” is “reduced”? In that case, there must be a dearth of “spirit” in this world.
Once, in the fall of 1973 my college roommate and I, on a trip to Manhattan from Baltimore, stopped by a major financial institution, and while waiting for my brother, who was treating us to lunch, one of his co-workers (in a suit, not a plumber’s coveralls) shouted across the floor, “Hey Mike, thanks for the handjob on that margin call, you ruined my day, motherfucker.” Then they both laughed. White-collar camaraderie. I started 10th grade in 1970, and swearing was, if not omnipresent, fairly routine (including teachers in private conversations). I guess “shit” and “fuck” were the most common expletives, but it was always raunchier in the designated smoking area, on the bus, or the nearby woods where kids got stoned. No one batted an eye. In addition, there was the daft notion in those days that “ribald” language and heavy drinking was exclusive to the “gutter tabloids.” The New York Times’ late Abe Rosenthal must’ve snorted at that myth.
At my college newspaper in the mid-1970s, the person who abstained from vulgarity, for better or worse, was the exception. (By the way, in 1971, Bob Dylan, a millionaire, in his half-baked “return to protest music” song “George Jackson,” sang “He didn’t take shit from no one.”) I worked at The Baltimore Sun in the summer of 1976, and even though, in deference to growing ranks of journalists, the newsroom looked like a p.r. firm, the well-dressed men and women who I performed chores for, weren’t above obscenity-laced gossip, or upbraiding me for alleged tardiness: “Hey asshole hippie, I needed that clip from 1974 as in yesterday. Dipshit.”
What’s always been worse than profanity is hypocrisy. A Times editorial last Friday, “Trump Has Freedom of Speech. Do You?, was a correct, if anodyne defense of the First Amendment that, was mostly scare-mongering blather about Trump’s “tasteless and even threatening language, speaking in ways that no previous president did.” Boiler-plate. But this stood out: “As we wrote last week, we are horrified by the killing of Mr. Kirk, and we mourn his death.” Any sane person was “horrified” by Kirk’s assassination, but “we mourn his death”? I doubt that any members of the Times editorial board “mourned” for Kirk. I didn’t, and that was in no way a slight. “Mourning” someone’s death is reserved for family, close friends and co-workers. That the Times chose to claim they “mourned” is vulgar.
The above photo was taken in Southampton one summer evening when my nephew invited a dozen or so college friends for a weekend of sports, drinking, philosophical debate and lots of swearing. I didn’t blush once.
Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: Hüsker Dü breaks up and The Smashing Pumpkins come together; Robert B. Parker’s Crimson Joy, Danielle Steele’s Zoya and Philip Roth’s The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography are published; Naguib Mahfouz wins the Literature Nobel Prize; FirstRepublic Bank of Texas fails; Arizona’s Gov. Evan Meacham is removed from office; PEPCON disaster in Henderson, Nevada; Ted Turner buys NWA Crockett and turns it into the World Wrestling Championship; Dellin Betances is born and Willie Kamm dies; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts The Drifters; U2’s double-LP Rattle and Hum is a smash; and the group Anal Cunt is formed.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023