Frankly, my dear, I don’t know how this happened.

There we were in 1939 when Clark Gable poked a hole in the dam of civil discourse when he emphatically declared to Scarlett, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  In other words, that’s when the verbal dam broke!  (Pun intended.)

It only took forty-six years for cursing in movies to reach a new high (or should I say low) with 511 F-bombs in movies released in 1985.

But wait, there’s more.  

According to a survey of 2023 movies by the Enjoy Movies Your Way filtering service — as reported in the February 10, 2024 WORLD Magazine —  there were 22,177 instances of that same expletive.  I am afraid to survey popular comedians. Can anyone tell a joke anymore without a slurry of F-words?  Thank you, Nate Bargatze, for proving it is possible to make people laugh without using obscenities.

Have our communication standards changed so much that the F-word is no longer a source of embarrassment for the rest of us? It makes me wonder if good manners, common courtesies, and social graces have gone the way of VHS tapes.

Having lived through multiple generations, it occurs to me that language, the words we use, has evolved.  Correction.  Evolve implies an ongoing improvement, however infinitesimally small.  The observations above suggest otherwise.   

There was a time when an inadvertent “cuss” word resulted in a youngin’s mouth being washed out with soap.  Certain four-letter words uttered in polite society would embarrass even a sailor on leave.  Any use of profanity earned the source a warning stare.  Today, it may only generate a chuckle.  

Miss Manners reminds us that “we are all born rude.”  I guess that’s a secular version of the biblical view that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Good manners must be caught and taught.  Even non-religious people, at one time, found the Second Commandment, “Do not take the Lord’s Name in vain” as a positive guide for civil conversation.  

Not anymore. 

Alas, with the standards of polite, respectful conversation crumbling like the walls of Jericho, linguistic freedom has embraced the vulgar.  Rejecting civility as something puritanical, our culture is in a constant pursuit to push moral boundaries and break free from any rhetorical restraints.  The guiding mantra for today’s self-obsessed is what else can I say to get the attention I want.

Apparently, the F-word is the answer.

Some social researchers suggest this is the result of American individualism.  We value individual self-expression so much that it was inevitable the crude and lewd would lose their raunchy reputation.

I have often thought that those who cannot utter a sentence without the inclusion of some vulgar reference were simply too ignorant.  They lacked the vocabulary or moral restraint (or both) for civil discourse.  Now, I fear that our culture has lost the will to teach and value that which is good, true, and beautiful.  Unless virtues are nourished in the home, a culture is doomed for moral collapse.

What good is freedom if it is only used to pursue the obscene? 

I recently noted that as long as humanity rejects absolute truth, humanity has an unlimited capacity to believe in the absurd.  And, I might add, as long as we devalue good manners and social graces, and tolerate the profane and obscene in our vocabulary, our language will grow more coarse and expletive-filled. Yes, foul language has always been with us. But as cultural mores fail to restrain the use of such inappropriate language, I fear, we only accelerate our slide into the abyss.

Meanwhile, we mock restraint and consider the Second Commandment as merely a laughable suggestion, ignoring that freedom without responsibility leads to anarchy and chaos. Might that road be paved with F-bombs?

And, we wonder why our culture is crumbling.