The ubiquity of @#$%&!? words

One of my favorite words is “ubiquitous”, or at least it was for 2010. I just sort of like the way it feels on my lips when I say it. The word is loosely defined as “present everywhere” such as “cell phones are ubiquitous.”

I think I need a new word for 2011, like “eponym.” An eponym is a word based on the name of a person, like boycott, named after Charles C. Boycott, an English land agent in Ireland, ostracized in 1880 for refusing to reduce rents. Another is guillotine, after Joseph Guillotin, a French physician who proposed its use in 1789 as more humane than hanging, according to texaschapbookpress.com.

Delving into the English language has been an interest of mine for as long as I can remember. I’ve never really wanted to sound particularly educated; I just like using different words. I don’t know how many teenagers were regular readers of William Safire, a frequent contributor to the “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine, but I was one. Mr. Safire was the speechwriter responsible for Spiro T. Agnew’s famous “nattering nabobs of negativism” in the 1960s, and I mourned his passing in 2009.

The problem is, people judge you by how you speak, and to only a slightly lesser degree by how you write. I tell this to young people all the time, but the fight gets harder and harder with the continual degradation of English.

I’ve used this column as a soapbox on this issue from time to time, but lately the ubiquity of the “F-bomb” has been really burning my biscuits. Look at the title to this column. The random string of symbols is what used to pass for profanity in the comic strips I read when I was little. A guy would have an anvil drop on his foot and in the balloon coming out of his mouth you would see “%$#@%*&^%$#!!” There was no need for any explicit words, and you got the idea.

Fast forward to the present day. Movie stars say @#$%$&!*!! during acceptance speeches for awards they shouldn’t get. Politicians we shouldn’t have voted for say @#$%$&!*!! when they get angry on Capitol Hill and soon look stupid all over C-Span and the Internet. And forget modern “music” or movies. Even in PG-13 films (don’t even get me started on the rating systems) you hear “@#$%$&!*!! this” or “@#$%$&!*!! that.” We recently saw a Broadway show set in the 60s, when I was young, and I never heard @#$%$&!*!! like I did that night.

People used to use it for shock value, but it’s heard so much that it isn’t a shock anymore. Kids hear adults say “what the @#$%$&!*!! do I care” and they think that to be adults they have to talk like that. They don’t.

Now for the sordid, horrible truth. I used to swear with the worst of them. I mean really bad. I learned how to string perhaps a dozen or more curse words in one sentence during my formative college years, and then honed my disgusting speech over the next 15 years or so of professional cooking. Then I just stopped. I grew out of it. Call it a religious experience if you want, but I just stopped.

Not to say that I’m presently a perfect little angel. I don’t exactly scream “excrement” when I hit my thumb with a hammer, and I’ll toss out the occasional “friggin’” or “freakin’” which, when you come to think of it, is almost as bad as @#$%$&!*!!.

Now, like a holier-than-thou former smoker who insults all his family and friends who haven’t quit, I do my best to stop profanity from spreading, at least as much as I can as an educator. I used to have a “cuss bucket” where the offender would chuck money in after an offense, but the successes were limited. Much more effective, I have found, is a handwritten two-page repetition of the phrase “cursing is unprofessional and a poor use of the English language,” with the promise of four pages for repeat offenders. (Had a kid do six, but only once.)

My dad hated cursing, and still does. In our household, the cure was instant and effective — a back of the hand across the chops followed by a soap sandwich.

The best cure for cursing I ever heard of was the one the parson used in the old Paul Bunyan tall tales. It was so cold at the logging camps that words immediately froze when coming out of the loggers’ mouths, including all the cuss words. So the parson would gather them all up and store them in a shed, and when the spring thaw arrived, he would lock the vilest offenders in the shed with the words, making them listen to them as they thawed out.

So for those who are predisposed to proffer profanity perhaps perceiving popular praise, I have this advice: get a @#$%$&!*!! thesaurus!