And, in line with Exapno’s skepticism, I ask: how does Milch know what actual words they used, and how frequently?
Anecdotally, there seems no question to me that common, careless public use of profanity is more widespread than it was just twenty years ago. I once asked a couple young guys on a DC Metro train to watch their language around my kids. In their sputtering response, they were literally unable to formulate a single sentence that did not include “fuck,” even to deny that they were excessively profane for a public setting.
Swearing is definitely done in mixed company here, even by fine and upstanding members of the community.
Not swearing to non-religious people, but perhaps best avoided in front of ultra-conservative religious people if you like them or have some sort of pressing requirement not to offend them.
Well, I’ll give him the first one, since that reports on a poll. The rest don’t have "we"s, they just have "I"s and aren’t worth the electrons wasted in their posting. You could find idiots like the Heaveno lady (the one who wants to take Hello out of the language) at any time in the past; they just spewed their idiocy in different forms. The expressions “swear like a sailor” or “swear like a fishwife” or “swear like an irishman” are ancient and come from the behavior of real people. Looking down at people who swore was a standard form of signifying the “other.” People who were lower class. People in “rough” professions. People not like “us.” As soon as you hear someone ask, do “we” swear more, your first question should be, who is “we?” “We” usually tends to be “not them.” Once you know that, the rest of the answer quickly follows.
I just realized that Exapno asked for “documentation that we think we swear more,” rather than evidence that, in fact, we do. I responded as if it was the latter, which was in line with the OP question in which the perception was taken as a given, and the SDMB was asked, “do we really?”
I did. I followed every one of them. It’s a poll of people’s perceptions. It supports, indeed, the assertion that most of us think we swear more today than before.
Well, I think so too, but that’s not data. It’s not much more scientific than what we could conduct here.
If we wanted a genuine study of the incidence of profanity, no single poll conducted in one year could suffice. We’d need polls which asked a series of quantitative questions (maybe, “How often did you hear the word [expletive] in the past week, in a public setting or workplace?”) periodically over a period of years.
That’s still based on people’s own recollections and reporting, but it asks them to judge only the past week rather than twenty years, and it asks for direct factual answers rather than judgments about facts over time.
To address the last couple of posts, I agree that only the first link was scientific. I was simply trying to show how ubiquitous the idea is that we are more profane today than we used to be.
And again, I’m not interested in the impression we have, but rather the reality of whether we swear more or not. If you think I’m incorrect about my previous assertion, I’ll gladly have a discussion about that as well.
As for data documenting instances of profanity, I never expected for anyone to dig up a major scientific study showing one thing or another (although I had hopes!). Can anyone find any historical documents talking about profanity? A journal entry? A news report? A doctoral thesis?
I appreciate all of the input thus far, especially all of those primary sources out there in the teeming millions!
I enjoy movies far less when they swear. It’s completely unnecessary and distracting. I don’t enjoy being around people who swear, and I certainly don’t enjoy second-hand swearing as I am going about my business or trying to relax and enjoy myself somewhere.
Has society replaced smoking to be cool with f-bombs and smack talk? I have to also suggest that the tendency to swear varies by culture, location, age, peer pressure, and other factors. I consider it to be a bad habit that one can simply choose to break. I think it is more likely, and I hope it always does remain more likely, that swearing is going to offend someone than not, and so it would be in anyone’s best interest to choose not to. However, it is also obvious that some people want to offend others (look at the t-shirts and bumper stickers and it doesn’t take long to find one).
I have a companion book for the series which has a section on the language of the show.
David Milch actually did a fair bit of research on the language and cursing of the era.
His take on it was the the amount of swearing you see in the show is about spot on, so if you take incontext that Deadwood was a frontier town you’d expect far more swearing than in ‘polite’ society in the big Eastern cities.
The big change he had to make was what swear words were used. Milch subbed into the script far more modern equavilents.
A modern audience wouldn’t be shocked, and would probably be amused, by profligerate use of ‘Damn’, ‘Bloody’ and ‘Hell’ and other words of that ilk. Which in modern society are no longer considered swear words.
The bombast and hostility in your post are a bit uncalled-for, don’t you think?
Where I grew up there were social and religious taboos against cursing. Most Protestant faiths have such taboos. Those taboos were observed, in public anyway, by most people. (On the other hand, if you put a bunch of men together in private, with maybe a bottle of whiskey, blue streaks ensued.)
These days the influence of religion is less, and the taboos against cursing in public have been lowered somewhat.
Those are just my observations, which are not what the OP asked for. I was just responding to your strangely absolutist assertion that there is “no reason to think” cursing is any more common today.
Since the OP is looking for data, I can’t help. I imagine actual data on cursing are pretty thin.
Regarding the Deadwood hijack, we had this discussion once before, and I think the consensus was that while the word “fuck” has been around a long time, it wasn’t used as an intensifier in those days. (My fucking shirt, that fucking hammer). Instead, “damn” and “goddamn” were the intensifiers of the day. (My damn shirt, that goddamn hammer.) As evidence, I recall an article by a historian mentioning the factoid that Indians in the vicinity sometimes referred to white people as “goddams” because of the frequency with which they were overheard to utter the phrase.
I would say yes.
As someone raised in Canada in the 40s and 50s the strongest words I ever heard in our family was bloody or damm. That is not to say we were not aware of stronger profanity but it was just not used
around anyone you had any consideration for. “Goddam” would get your mouth washed out with sunlight
soap by the handiest female adult, and a dressing down that did not need any profanity for emphasis.
Even today none of my siblings will use profanity casually (although I cannot say the same for our children, however they know better than to use it in front of our generation.
When I hear someone going on as in the Mel Gibson tapes, I am not so much offended as amazed at their limited vocabulary.
Very good observation; I think you’re right on, about swearing in mixed company. And I think women swear more freely now than they used to–in mixed company.