Expletive F***ing Deleted

Fuck it. I wonder if others who write have often had that experience of roughly knowing what they want to say, but not being able to find the proper beginning. That bitch of a Muse of mine doesn’t seem to have got her lazy ass out of bed this morning. Shit!

I started thinking about this whole subject after reading something my fellow blogger, Lisa Golden wrote, “I'm trying to not curse. It's an experiment, an exercise in self restraint …” and where she went on to talk about “season[ing] every sentence with a sulfuric dash of that oh so versatile word fuck.”

Actually, I don’t. Or at least don’t very frequently, if only because of the fact that around 90% of the time I’m generally speaking German rather than English and cursing is different in German. Indeed, of around the half dozen languages in which I manage to be more or less incoherent, in none of the others can what is sometimes called “foul language” be so consistently and comprehensively integrated as in English.

Oh, there are certainly flowery and expressive expressions available in other languages. One need only think of the Spanish, “La puta madre que te pario!” or the Italian, “Stronzo! Figlio di puttana!” The Mediterranean languages seem to have a tendency to go beyond simply calling someone a bastard to directly stating that his mother was a whore. But English is the only language I know which offers the possibility of taking a vulgar word for copulation and then inserting it as an adjectival or adverbial qualification with almost unlimited frequency in every sentence.

It makes me wonder about how translators sometimes deal with this particular variety of colloquialism. Of course, colloquialism is always a difficult area for translation, since it involves a very good command of both languages as well as a healthy portion of imagination.

Many years ago, after first coming to Germany, I spent a while working as an English teacher. There is a German colloquial expression for extreme indifference, Scheiss egal. I remember a student once telling me with some pride that something was “shit equal” to him.

“No, Stefan, you can’t say it like that in English,” I told him.

“Ok, well then, how do you say Scheiss egal in English?”

I thought about it for a moment and then grinned. I had the perfect English equivalent.

“Right, Stefan, remember this one, because this is really good English. Though you wouldn’t say it to your granny, any more than you’d say Scheiss egal to her. The English for Es ist mir scheiss egal is … I don’t give a fuck!”

But on reflection, that one was easy. There are however other scenarios.

This is not working, at least not the way I want it to. There’re all kinds of ideas I have about this subject but they’re just not gelling. Fragments. No fucking flow …

There is a nexus about bad language; it’s all associated with sex and digestive waste elimination, penis and vagina and anus, urine and faeces – fuck and prick and cock and cunt, piss and shit. And it all has to do with common, low, vulgar words. Calling a woman “you copulating vagina!” doesn’t really cut it, anymore than telling someone to urinate or copulate off does.

This is all very Freudian, of course, perhaps even a kind of practical proof that the old papa of psychoanalysis was onto something pretty basic with his categorisation of oral, anal and genital phases (though the oral phase doesn’t play any significant role when it comes to cursing). And in terms of national characteristics, the Freudian interpretation can also be carried through to an interpretation of the German psyche as based on linguistic characteristics.

Where in English bad language the copulatory “fuck” or “fucking” is the most common linguistic qualifier, in German it’s Scheisse or Scheiss-. And whereas in English probably the most common denigratory personal expression is “bastard,” in German it’s Arsch [arse] or, most frequent of all, Arschloch [arse-/asshole]. Which suggests that Germans are – in the Freudian sense – extraordinarily anally fixated. Which explains why Germany is a country where so much emphasis is placed on organisation, discipline, administration and efficiency (even if it often doesn’t work and is frequently counterproductive). Anally fixated, the whole lot of them, real controlling arseholes. Just ask the Greeks.

[If my memory serves me correctly (for it is many years since I read the book) Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying offers corroboration for this viewpoint. She describes a particular kind of toilet bowl, common in Germany at the time, which has a kind of porcelain shelf on which the turd lands after a bowel movement rather than landing directly in the water, so that it can be examined by its producer before being flushed away – another indication of anal fixation. However, I can also report that in the almost forty years since the book was published, such toilet bowls are becoming increasingly rare in Germany. Whether that is a deeper indication of a “loosening-up” in the collective German psyche is a judgement I’m not prepared to make.]

All right, all right, this shit is finally starting to go somewhere! Down the toilet. But, Jesus Christ, there’s that fucking wall again – just when I think I’m on a roll, my shite imagination runs out of fucking ideas and I have to start on another track. Bollocks!

There is also a tremendous amount of ambivalence, not to mention hypocrisy, about this whole subject. We were taught as kids (and, indeed, most kids are still taught today) that these are all naughty words, bad words, and that it’s wrong to use them. But of course children do, teaching each other all the words, whispering them to each other before they have an idea what many of them actually mean, giggling about them. Because they know that, somehow, they are words of secrecy and power, words which refer to that uncertain world of pleasure and danger which is adult and seductive and scary all at the same time. Sex, in other words. Ah, Freud, there he is again!

Bad language, it’s called; cursing or swearing. In fact, of course, it is neither of these. Cursing means a formal wishing or calling down of ill or evil on someone. Swearing is a formal declaration of the truth of something. Saying “fuck,” “shit,” “cunt,” “prick,” or “arse” has nothing to do with either of these activities. But, in my old-fashioned, early Catholic education, I was taught that this was “cursing,” and cursing was a sin. So you went to confession and said, “Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It’s two weeks since my last confession. I cursed twenty seven times.” And you got absolution for it, and a penance – maybe three Hail Marys, something like that.

Now, exclamations like “Jesus Christ!” or “Mother of God!” are something of a different case. From a religious point of view they could be conceivably called sinful on the basis of “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” On the other hand, their frequent use could also be seen as a sign of fundamental religiosity, an expression of a subconscious awareness of the continual presence and support of God and his saints in one’s life, so that one is constantly moved to spontaneous prayer, the repeated invocation of divine support in every moment. Calling on God, even in the moment of climax.

Oh God! That bitch of a Muse of mine is really fucking lazy today. I need a blow-job from her to finish this and I don’t even get a prick-tease. Cunt!

Our society has been loosening up in this whole area over the last fifty years or so. In 1960, the publication of the unabridged version of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was finally allowed by the courts in the UK (a year earlier in the USA). Apart from the explicit descriptions of sex, one of the major complaints about the book was the use of the words “fuck” and “cunt” in it. Today, broad-band networks are being clogged with millions of downloads of Fifty Shades of Grey and no one gives a shit. You’ll find “shit” and “fuck” turning up even in quality newspapers occasionally – without conventional circumlocutory asterisks – particularly in interviews or quoted speech. In Germany, it was the young Green politician, Joschka Fischer (who later became Foreign Minister), who first broke a parliamentary taboo in the Bundestag in 1984 with his famous statement to the deputy speaker, "Mit Verlaub, Herr Präsident, Sie sind ein Arschloch.". ["If I may say so, Mr. President, you are an arsehole"] – using, one notes in passing, the polite Sie rather than the familiar du form of address.

In the list of 105 films which use the word “fuck” more than 150 times in Wikipedia, only five were made before 1990. Martin Scorsese makes the Top 30 twice (Goodfellas [1990] 11 – with “fuck” or its derivatives occurring 300 times in the course of the film – and The Departed [2006] 28 – 237 “fucks”). But the use of “explicit” language has even spread beyond cinema and into television. The Wire, in my opinion probably the best series ever made (though fans of Breaking Bad, and Mad Men may, with some justification, disagree), has a classic scene, where two cops, Bunk and McNulty, spend five minutes investigating a crime scene and solving a mystery in the process and in which the entire dialogue consists solely of “fuck” or derivatives thereof. It doesn’t get any better than this.

  “Bad” language is a characteristic of almost every character in The Wire, from the drug dealers on the street, to the politicians in City Hall and beyond. Worth mentioning particularly here is State Senator Clay Davis, with his marvellous, “Sheee-it!” And, speaking of politicians, it is reported that President Obama has stated that The Wire is his favourite TV show. Which gets me to wondering about how The Wire would have portrayed the president telling Secretary of State Clinton about the planned attack on Osama Bin Laden:

Yo, bitch, we gonna fuck that motherfucker Bin Laden, shit, we gonna waste his nigger Ay-rab ass!”

Though to be completely accurate, motherfucker would become mo-fuh in Baltimore project slang.

Well, fuck you, Muse, I’ve finally managed to get to the home stretch of this bitchin’ essay, Just goes to show that you haven’t left me entirely on my fucking own. Gimme a last little kiss, you cunt!

Nothing is as sensitive to inflation as bad language. My general philosophy is not to forbid myself its use – either in speech or in my writing here – but to use it very sparingly (with the obvious exception of this somewhat experimental essay). It works much better that way, retaining its original potency to emphasise, to shock, to pull the reader up suddenly and refocus her or his attention on what you want to say. It’s like the difference between the marvellously seductive promise of a skilfully erotic hint of a flashed nipple and the jaded tawdry tiredness of a spread-legged full-frontal cheap porn centrefold. Sometimes “fuck” is the only way to say it, more often you don’t need to.

And, despite all the authenticity and spontaneity of modern film and TV, our use of expletives is far more under our conscious control than we would often like to admit. Even the most habitual serial foul-mouthed punk will be able to control his expletives if he suddenly finds himself in the company of half a dozen nuns. We have a remarkable linguistic flexibility which enables us to instinctively almost completely adapt our language styles to the environment. Even people who in many situations cuss with an instinctive fluid frequency will automatically “tone down” their language in the presence of their children, or children generally. Not to mention in the presence of their mothers …

Shit! I’ve just realised my mother reads every fucking thing I post here.

* * *

 

[Note on the music: I usually put some music at the end of a post which has some kind of connection to the theme I’ve been writing about, and I usually don’t insult the intelligence of those who visit my blog by explaining the connection. But this one needs some background.

When John Lennon recorded “Working Class Hero” forty-two (!) years ago, the song caused some furore by containing the word “fucking” twice at a time when this kind of language in the music of a major star was almost unheard of. It’s a perfect example of an excellent use of “bad” language – “fucking” being used naturally and perfectly to give just the right emphasis to the mood and expression of the sentiments involved in their context. There’s not a hint of gratuity or prurience about it.

The two lines in question are:

“’Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules.”

and

“But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see.”

Thirty seven years later, Green Day released an excellent cover of the song, as part of an Amnesty International Campaign about Darfour. In the official video the two “fuckings” are blended out. Ah, the eternal hypocrisy of the music business! If you prefer to listen to an uncensored version you can find it here]

Pictures retrieved from:

http://www.signs-unique.co.uk/ekmps/shops/autounique/images/note-to-self.-you-re-f-ing-awesome-funny-fridge-magnet-ep--7766-p.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/77/Fear_of_Flying_%28novel%29_1st_ed_cover.jpg

http://teamhandballnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/FBomb1.png

What are Words Worth? 2.) Language and Reality

This post is a continuation of a previous one http://francishunt.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html

In the beginning was the word …

Language and consciousness are indivisibly bound up with each other. This realisation has many consequences for the way we understand and explain things.

The first thing we should always be aware of is that our understanding, our expressing of the way things are, is an expression of the way we see and explain things. We define in our language; out of these definitions, these namings, we build ideas, concepts, meanings, theories, explanations. They are the products of our human perceptions, our particular situations, our societies, our histories. The way we see and explain the world and everything in it is our way, formed and limited by the language we use to express it.

This basic insight, both difficult and banal, is confirmed by both a major trend in philosophy and modern theoretical physics. In philosophy, the tendency can be traced back as far as Kant, at the end of the eighteenth century, and can be (simplifying a complex area greatly) called phenomenology. At its simplest, the phenomenological approach notes that everything we experience, think and talk about happens at the meeting point between our human observing consciousness and whatever-it-is that is “out there [i],” often called the “thing-in-itself.” This meeting-point is called “phenomenon.” In over two hundred years, philosophers have debated endlessly over what one can say about the “thing-in-itself,” or, indeed, whether we can say anything about it at all. On this last point, as I think has already become clear, I belong to those who are extremely sceptical.

This viewpoint is supported by one of the major trends in 20^th Century theoretical physics, quantum theory. A basic conclusion which comes from various formulations of the “uncertainty principle” at the core of quantum theory [ii] is that, in any scientific experiment carried out, the very fact of observation has an influence on the result of the experiment. This is generally accepted by theoretical physicists today and has major consequences for the theoretical foundations of science, based as they are on ideas like neutral objectivity and the repeatability of experiments.

So, what does all this have to do with language? If the ideas of the philosophers and physicists are correct, then any statements we make about everything are products of our observing human consciousness and this consciousness is intimately, indivisibly entwined with the language we use to express and describe anything, the language we use to communicate our thoughts, to meaningfully interact with each other. Seen this way, in a very real sense it can be said that in naming things we create them. This seems completely crazy or, to use a term used by those who think seriously about such things, counterintuitive. To put it even more simply, it seems to contradict everything we experience, to contradict “common sense.” But when we think about some things a bit more, it becomes clearer. Many of the concepts according to which we organise our lives and societies would have been incomprehensible to people three hundred years ago, at least in the sense in which we use and understand them; democracy, equality, freedom … economics. Maybe one of the best examples is an idea we understand as basic for the functioning of a decent society – that of human rights. Ideas coalescing, developing, interacting with people and groups and their actions, being named.

There are other implications, too. The great Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, spent a lot of time thinking about language and the way it works. One of his insights was that we use language according to rules in much the same way as games are organised by rules. And often, the same words can have different meanings because they are used in different games. As long as all the “players” are following the same rules then there’s no problem. But frequently, people use the same words and assume that others understand them, whereas, in fact, the others are “playing according to different rules.” A Chinese delegate to the United Nations may understand the phrase “common good” very differently to a delegate from the USA, simply because the histories of both cultures and the conceptual frameworks within which they work are different.

So, our consciousness orders and structures the mass of ‘things’ we perceive, naming and cataloguing things, putting impressions and events, everything we perceive really, into our own subjective categories, organising according to our experiences, our preconceptions, our priorities and beliefs. It’s a continual, complex process with countless streams of thoughts and ideas being born, developing, dying away, memories and actually occurring experiences, feelings and emotions influencing, forming and reforming each other, feedback loops – positive and negative – happening all over the place. In his (even for non-philosophers quite readable) book “Consciousness Explained,” the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett argues that consciousness itself is nothing other than this extremely complex process. But even if you don’t want to go as far as Dennett does, the network underlying and carrying all of this is language, made of words.

In the beginning was the word … John the Divine (and the many other Greek thinkers playing with the concept of Logos) was on to something very deep here – even if my use of the phrase here has little to do with the conventional Christian interpretation of it. And we spin the words and turn them, play with them and combine them – into phrases, statements, ideas and concepts, feelings and poems and diatribes and promises, handbooks and bibles and lists; fundamental building blocks of our ordering of our perceptions, our lives, our world.

This has all kinds of implications about the way we see, react to and mould the worlds in which we find ourselves. One interesting train of thought, for example, is the examination of the major ways that views of the world and what is called “reality” change when cultures make the change from a general oral basis to the written world [iii]. But that’s a topic for another day. I’ll finish this post with the image of a group of early humans, gathered around a fire providing warmth and protection, and the smiles of anticipation when one of the elders signifies assent to the request, “Tell us a story!” …

---

[i] In the history of philosophy this basic insight, and the questions arising from it, go back further than Kant. A famous philosophical riddle which poses the problem was stated by the Irish thinker, Bishop George Berkeley at the beginning of the 18^th Century; “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” [Berkeley stated the question slightly differently, but that’s not important.] Hundreds of years earlier, a Zen story/riddle (koan) states it somewhat differently, but – in my opinion – very beautifully: "Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, "The flag moves." The other said, "The wind moves." They argued back and forth but could not agree. Hui-neng said, "Gentlemen! It is not the wind that moves; it is not the flag that moves; it is your mind that moves." The two monks were struck with awe."

- The Mumonkan Case 29, translation by Robert Aitken

[ii] Elaborated most famously by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 in his thought-experiment involving a cat in a box which seems to be unavoidably alive and dead at the same time until the box is opened, on the basis of which he put forward the (for subsequent developments in quantum theory) very important concept of “entanglement.”

[iii] Those interested in reading more about this subject could look at the works of Walter J. Ong and Erik A. Havelock. (Thanks to Lara for fascinating conversations and reading tips about this J)

What are Words Worth? 1.) The origin of language

My own life story gives me many reasons to be fascinated with language. I have scattered, random memories of the first five years of my life before I learned to read, but one of the clearest truest memories I have is the feeling of incredible joy I had on reading my first books – the realisation that there were infinities of worlds waiting for me, and all I had to do to get to them was to open page one. Reading was the first addiction of my life; it has proved to be the most benign and durable.

Other incidents reinforced my interest in language. I spent nearly a decade as a member of a Catholic religious order formally known as the Order of Preachers – among such a group, words and language were always going to be central. I studied philosophy, and no-one who comes into contact with modern philosophy can fail to be confronted with the many thorny and compelling questions which crop up when one starts to think about language. And then, more than half my life ago now, I left Ireland and moved to countries in which I had to learn to communicate and live in languages other than my native one. Lost in translation is more than a description, sometimes it can become a state of being.

Evolutionary psychology is a branch of science where most details are controversial, yet its basic postulate is accepted by most mainstream scientists (I refuse to try to discuss such ways of thinking with creationists – it’s futile); evolution, our adaptation to changing, different circumstances pushed the development of the brains of one particular sub-group of primates in the African savannah so that the phenomenon we describe as human consciousness appeared. Personally, I consider the term consciousness – if often used – too general; I prefer to specify it somewhat more as self-reflective consciousness. That which makes humans different from other animals is not intelligence (which can be greater or lesser), or consciousness (for all animals are conscious), but a capacity for self-awareness; as humans we are aware and are aware of the fact that we are aware. This fundamental awareness leads to the basic bifurcation of our consciousness, the division of that which we perceive into “I” and “not-I”. The next step comes quickly, the realisation that some “not-Is” are also “Is” in their own right and thus have their own awareness of themselves. And all of this could not happen if we were not, concomitantly, developing the capacity, in some sense, to name this.

In the beginning was the Word …

It is my firm belief that language and consciousness are ineluctably bound up with each other. There are all kinds of indications from modern scientific analysis and philosophical consideration that support this.

Fifty-five years have now gone by since the legendary and, amazingly, still cuttingly intellectually active Noam Chomsky produced his theory of transformational grammar, which basically argues that all children have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structures common to all human languages. Incredibly, particularly given his propensity for controversy, good alternative models, which completely refute Chomsky’s basic insight (argument over developments, details and consequences are another matter) are very difficult to find. An immediate conclusion which can be drawn from Chomsky’s hypotheses is that the rules of grammar – the basic toolkit we use to combine words to express meaning – are built into our brains at a very deep level. This is an indication that language, words, naming, are part of the basic architecture of the way our minds work. Language and consciousness are Siamese twins sharing the same vital organ – the brain – and if we try to separate them, both will die or, at the very least, become very badly damaged.

Anthropologists tell is that anatomically modern humans emerged around 200,000 years ago in Africa and that there is firm evidence of basic human culture, including language, from about 50,000 years ago. This sub-species succeeded in quickly supplanting other proto-human groups, including the famous Neanderthals. It would seem then that the development of consciousness and language took place some time within this period. The experts argue about almost everything in this time scale but there is one train of thought which seems to me to be useful with regard to the way this happened.

Humans, like almost all primates, are intensely social beings. All primates have complex social structures and complex methods of expressing, communicating, preserving and developing them. One of the main social instruments used by monkeys and apes in this respect is mutual grooming, as anyone who has ever visited a zoo, or had the greater luck to seen them in the wild, will have observed. Who grooms who, in what context, in what way, for how long, etc. are all complex statements, confirmations, blandishments, challenges, realignments of position and status within the group. It is the communicative cement which holds the group together, the interactive lubricant which keeps it working.

Of the primates, humans have the most complex social structures of all yet, although we still find grooming in many – mostly intimate – situations pleasurable, it no longer plays this central role for us. What happened?

When our ancestors left the forests for the savannah, started going upright and developing their cooperative foraging to increase the proportion of animal protein and fat in their diet this had a number of consequences. Brain volume increased. A larger brain was an evolutionary risk – initially it posed as many disadvantages as advantages. Increased intelligence was necessary for this form of life, but such a large brain needed more nutrition and more oxygen. It also needed to be kept at a pretty constant temperature to function well and the general environment and the fact that its possessor had to be able to move fast to nourish itself and avoid danger in the savannah led to an increased danger of overheating. The physiological answer to this was a loss of body-hair (with the obvious exception of the head) and an increased ability to sweat.

This disappearance of hair made the intense and complex grooming practiced by primates more difficult – and more senseless. Grooming is also very time-consuming and works only one-to-one, so that it automatically limits both the size of the group and the possibilities of communicating information beyond a certain degree of complexity. Yet at the same time, the new way of life adapted by the man-apes demanded ever more complex communication within the group. The increased brain volume, with the concomitant increase in intelligence, however, also offered the processing power for an alternative, much more refined form of communication than grooming.

The solution to the problem of communication was the development of language, a much more sophisticated form of communication, which in turn led to a further growth in intelligence and somewhere in this process, slowly, incrementally, true human self-awareness developed. Without self-awareness, no language; without language, no mind.

In the beginning was the word …

(to be continued)