\u00a0<\/p>\n
In case you missed it, and I hope desperately that you did, I was on Patrick Madrid\u2019s radio show yesterday afternoon after stepping into the middle of a little Twitter dust-up over female Catholic bloggers cussing.<\/p>\n
Naturally, I was defending the practice of cussing, because I\u00a0\u2665 that shit. Also naturally, I was mostly incoherent through the steady stream of \u201cummming\u201d I was doing. It\u2019s been years since I regularly had intelligent conversations that required quick thinking (with my mouth, not with a keyboard), so I also failed to make the most important point about this whole issue.<\/p>\n
I assumed that what we were talking about was preference. Cultural sensibility. Whether or not these words are acceptable in the everyday lexicon of the average Joe. Patrick himself, in his initial tweet, wasn\u2019t talking about right or wrong but preference. He doesn\u2019t find it \u201cattractive\u201d when women swear. That\u2019s a matter of preference, not objective morality.<\/p>\n
But when Patrick opened the show, he began talking about it in terms of sins. I wish I had caught it then, because I believe the conversation that followed would have been much more fruitful if we had started with an important distinction. The most important distinction that needs to be understood in the context of language.<\/p>\n
God gave us the gift of language. Language is a beautiful, even sacred, thing. The universe began with language. \u201cIn the beginning was the Word.\u201d The Word. That\u2019s Christ. Our Savior. God\u2019s only Son. The Word<\/em>.\u00a0 That is how important language is. So when people take the use and abuse of language seriously, I get it. I\u2019m there, man. I like slang as much as the next person, but ignore the Oxford comma or text me with single-letter \u201cwords\u201d that resemble nothing so much as an illiterate Egyptian\u2019s hieroglyphs, and I will not be a happy English major.<\/p>\n But although God gave us the gift of language, he didn\u2019t give us the languages we use<\/strong>. Those are all our creations. Every word I know in my native tongue and even the ones I mangle in French and Italian are man-made. They have no meaning in and of themselves, save the meaning we give to them. Most of them are some sort of mash-up of Old English and Middle Low German or any of the other dialects that have fallen out of use. \u201cCrap\u201d, for example. Certainly one of the milder cuss words, and although I personally don\u2019t consider it cussing at all, my mom still drops her voice to a whisper when she says it. That word, at least the American usage of it, comes from Thomas Crapper<\/a>, the man who made a killing after he designed the ballcock system for toilet refilling and installed his top-of-the-line toilets all over Britain. Obviously, the word refers to feces. People rarely object to the word feces. But then, we don\u2019t use feces as an exclamatory outburst. \u201cOh, crap!\u201d can regularly be heard in my house when I knock something over or put my hand down on a hot burner. But I\u2019m not literally talking about feces. We all understand this. If I replaced \u201ccrap\u201d with the less offensive \u201cfeces\u201d my meaning would be the same: \u201cI am surprised and angry that I was stupid enough to put my hand down on this clearly glowing burner and now my hand will hurt for the rest of the evening. This sucks.\u201d That\u2019s what is summed up in those two little syllables, \u201coh!\u201d and \u201ccrap!\u201d It\u2019s remarkable, isn\u2019t it? You could replace \u201ccrap\u201d with anything, and it would have the same meaning, but it wouldn\u2019t have the same connotation. Someone on the radio show suggested saying \u201coh biscuits!\u201d Okay, but why? That\u2019s a completely random word that doesn\u2019t actually mean what\u2019s being conveyed that\u2019s been chosen to replace another word that also doesn\u2019t mean what\u2019s being conveyed. What you lose in that trade is the connotation. \u201cOh, crap\u201d = something bad has happened. \u201cOh, biscuits\u201d = ?<\/p>\n Unless we all start saying \u201coh biscuits\u201d as a society. Then, eventually,\u00a0 it would take on the same connotation as crap. And then you would have a radio show where someone would call in and suggest saying the neutral word \u201ccrap\u201d instead of the offensive \u201cbiscuits.\u201d<\/p>\n See what I mean? Words are tools. There are no words that are inherently bad<\/strong>. And yes, even \u201cgoddamned\u201d isn\u2019t an inherently bad word. \u201cSodom and Gomorrah were Goddamned\u201d is a true and accurate statement that is neither blasphemous nor sinful. What makes words bad or good, objectively, is how we use them. If a teenage male says to a teenage female, \u201cgee I sure would like to squeeze your biscuits\u201d, then he\u2019s taken a neutral word and used it in a degrading and insulting manner. It\u2019s not the word that\u2019s bad, but the use of it.<\/p>\n Which brings us to the important distinction of cussing vs. cursing<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Yesterday, I said that Michael Voris\u2019 assertion that only a faithful Catholic could be unselfish was a steaming crock of shit. That was cussing. I was using the word \u201cshit\u201d to describe his assertion<\/em>. Maybe it offended people, but it wasn\u2019t a sin. If I had said, \u201cMichael Voris is a steaming crock of shit,\u201d that<\/em> would have been cursing. And that would have been a sin.<\/p>\n When the Bible talks about cursing and foul language, I believe this is what they are talking about. We\u2019ll never know for certain, because those authors were writing for a completely different time. But I believe that\u2019s what they were talking about because they were talking about sin. And sin is not dependent on cultural sensibilities.<\/strong><\/p>\n When Shakespeare was writing, his use of the word \u201cZounds\u201d caused great scandal, because it was a terribly blasphemous word meaning \u201cGod\u2019s wounds.\u201d I said \u201czounds, zooks!\u201d this morning when I was playing with my 2 year old and his cars, and I\u2019m positive that even someone extremely sensitive to swearing wouldn\u2019t have blinked an eye at that. That\u2019s because our cultural sensibilities have changed. That\u2019s not a bad thing, by the way, and it\u2019s not a thing that can be stopped. Language evolves whether we want it to or not. That\u2019s the point I was trying to make on Patrick\u2019s show about my own use of cuss words. It might be offensive to some, but unless I\u2019m cursing someone with them, it\u2019s a morally neutral choice. It certainly does not make me a bad Catholic. I certainly do not run to the confessional every time I stub a toe and mutter a four-letter word under my breath, no matter which four-letter word it is.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n What about giving scandal, you ask? I believe that giving scandal is a hysterically overly-used default setting that is roundly abused in the blogosphere when someone disagrees but can\u2019t make a coherent argument as to why. However, I suppose that the use of gratuitous \u201cbad\u201d words, however morally neutral the words themselves, might cause scandal in certain situations. If I were to run into the middle of St Peter\u2019s and start shouting every dirty word I ever learned at the top of my lungs, that would be scandalous. But in that situation, my intent would be to scandalize. I would be willing to bet that any situation in which true <\/em>scandal is given by the use of cuss words is created intentionally. Situations like teenagers or young adults cussing prolifically in front of elementary-school children, for example. Or a conversation loaded with one-sided profanity with someone well-respected at a formal venue. But a blogger (even a female one!) tossing off a four-letter word every other post? Every post? Even twice a post? Nope. Not scandalous. It may offend someone\u2019s sensibilities, but it\u2019s not a scandal. Here\u2019s the definition of scandal, from the OED:<\/p>\n