The words we choose

Have you noticed that Tucker Carlson swears a lot these days? Interesting phenomenon. Part of the explanation is that he can, of course. No longer under Fox and FCC indecency rules, he can say whatever he jolly well pleases.

Speaking of “jolly,” the other British adverb “bloody” is a swear word in the U.K. I always assumed the prohibition against “bloody” had to do with some atavistic reverberation from an earlier, Christianized Britain. But a Google check says it may derive from corruption of the phrase “by Our Lady,” or perhaps hearkens to the aristocratic ruffians of the 17th century called the “bloods.” If my earlier hunch is correct, one can imagine why irreverent casualness about the blood of Christ would be taboo.

My ancestors all came from Quebec. It might interest you that in French Canada, swear words are not so much sexual or excretory as derived from Christian, and specifically Catholic, concepts. Blasphemous exclamations about the “tabernacle” and the “host” are made thousands or millions of times a day in Quebec. In my mainly French-speaking hometown in Rhode Island the name of Jesus Christ was a staple in response to minor accidents or annoyances.

I wonder sometimes if this may partly explain why that province north of New England has never seemed blessed or amounted to much culturally, in the arts, or in the sciences. (May I say such a thing as a daughter of Samuel de Champlain?) As Ichabod’s mother moaned, dying, “The glory has departed.” The Quebecois separatist movement has always seemed as funny to me as a finger declaring independence from the body. Do you really think you would survive?

Here is my short personal history of swearing: In seventh grade Louise and I walked home from school and tried to come up with as many swear words as we could. In 10th grade I was in the play rendition of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, performed before a packed audience of students and parents, where nuns and parish priests occupied the front rows.

During a snowball-throwing scene on stage, in one of those sudden lulls resulting from the collective cessations of audience laughter that are as mysterious as avian murmurations, Louise (same girl), performing in the role of Charlie Brown, playfully and loudly called me a foul word as she hurled her foam snow projectile.

The echo of it resounded through Thevenet Hall and hung over it like a slow-motion detonation. The row of nuns and priests gasped, and there was no joy in Mudville for some time after that.

One fascinating thing about swear words is that the words themselves need not even be objectively bad. My father’s most overworked profanity of choice when angry was an expression I have no trouble writing in this essay because no reader will be offended by it: Cheval vert! (literally “Green horse!”). The only way I knew it was fraught with moral impropriety is that I was not allowed to utter it.

That alone says something deep about the subject of cussing—that the moral problem has to do with the motive of the heart even more than the specific lexical item invoked. The sin is there even where the words are intrinsically innocuous. You will remember from Scripture that Jesus always pushed the locus of sin down from the external to the internal: “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person” (Matthew 15:18). And so, to say “cheval vert” would not be sin for you, but it would have been for me, and have earned me a mouth-washing with soap.

Back to Tucker Carlson. He, Megyn Kelly, and other public figures have, in the second half of their lives, seen fit to consciously adopt into their podcasting a linguistic habit that has traditionally been considered rude and shocking. I say “consciously” because of course they have. We are not going to buy the canard that they can’t help it—that they become at moments so overwhelmed with righteous indignation that moral emotion erupts in their souls in the form of four-letter words.

We like to pretend that swearing is spontaneous, or is just us being ourselves: I may have been born with a silver spoon in my mouth and hobnobbed at Yale, but I’m just a regular guy. The truth is that swearing is a very calculated thing. One proof is that you can calculate the opposite too: Jerry Seinfeld claims to deliberately avoid swearing in his stand-up, not from any moral compunction but as comedic strategy, eschewing the cheap laugh.

My husband once said to me, “People will laugh at the base things you say at the moment, but later they will think less of you.” I rather hope that certain language will go back again to being deemed distasteful.