Have you noticed that movie characters no longer seem to take the Lord’s name in vain the way I sort of remember them once doing? I became acutely aware of this watching Napoleon Dynamite back when it was fresh and new: one of his catchphrases is “Gosh!” with a very hard “GAH” and almost no “sh”. Now it’s everywhere.
Is there some sort of political correctitude guiding the hands of Hollywood screenwriters? Is this by edict of some secret society, or just some new sensibility I’m too old to be hip to? Not that I have a strong need to defy the authors of the ten commandments, but ‘gosh’ kinda takes the punch out of the exclamation; they might as well go with ‘golly’. I’m just trying to imaging Dave rushing toward the monolith at the end of 2001 saying, “Golly, it’s all full of stars.”
It’s the same reason people say darn instead of damn, it’s less offensive. I haven’t noticed it being said with any more frequency than it ever has. I think that was just one of Napoleon Dynamite many idiosyncracies.
Napoleon Dynamite is not a random sample. The movie is (at least partially) a satire of Idaho Mormondom, where saying “God” is a big no-no. Hence: “gosh,” “darn,” and “fetch.” I don’t remember if they actually use “fetch” in the movie, but go to Idaho/Utah and you’ll hear a bunch of “fetch” and “flip.” It doesn’t mean that it’s becoming more common in the world. At least, fetch, I hope to gosh not.
I suppose it would be more correct to say that Napoleon Dynamite is a satire of southern Idaho culture, which happens to have a strong Mormon influence on it. At any rate, that’s why gosh is so popular there.
Maybe it’s just backlash from the overuse of “hard” profanity in movies during the '90s? So many movies then seemed to contain nonstop streams of “fuck” and “goddammit” that it kind of lost its impact, and so now they’re not doing it so much.
It seems to me that the movies of the '90s, for their part, contained much less gratuitous nudity than the movies of the '80s, so kind of the same thing going on.
However, I’m not a huge moviegoer, so I could be talking out my butthole
I think you’re reading too much into a single phenomenon. People mimicked Napoleon’s mannerisms including the catchphrases, and you seem to have interpreted this as an overarching movement to avoid taking the Lord’s name in vain. Do you have any other examples of this phenomenon? I’m just not seeing this trend outside of that one example.
My apologies; I didn’t mean to imply that movies and TV are impersonating Napoleon, only that that was the time I became aware of people no longer saying, “My GOD!” when shocked or appalled by something. In this day and age when prime time TV characters use a pretty extensive lexicon of oaths, swears and assorted colorful metaphors, I find it peculiar that it’s acceptable to show a crime scene investigator walking into a meat locker filled with freshly skinned bodies, yet script their response as “My Gosh! Who could have skinned these bodies?” While I can’t think of a specific example, it seems TV characters used to ‘My God’ their way through all manner of trial and tribulation. MASH, maybe.
