Bad language

A few weeks ago at choir practice, as part of some training exercise, Paolo the director asked us to yell at someone outside to me here.  When it was my turn, on the spur of the moment, I yelled, "Come here, you sonuvabitch!" Everyone laughed.  And "sonuvabitch" is a word I'd never used in real life.  It just seemed like the fun thing to say at the moment. (Now that I think on it, I might have said, "Getcher stupid ass in here, you goddamm sonuvabitch!" But that might have been overdoing it.)

Different generations have different standards about dirty words.  In The Music Man there's the line "Has your son started using words like 'swell' and 'So's your old man!'?" And my mother remembered how you could get thrown out of a British pub for using the word "bloody."

Back in the 1950s the big Catholic organization condemned the movie The Moon Is Blue because it used words like "virgin" and "seduce"!  In the musical Kiss Me, Kate the song "Brush up Your Shakespeare" has the line, "They'll think you're a helluva fellow." The '50s movie changed it to "heckuva"! (That movie also changed the "Too Darn Hot" line "According to the Kinsey Report..." to "According to the latest report..." Mustn't be controversial!)

Recent TV shows, of course, have been more liberal with bad language.  There was this western series Deadwood with a Chinese gang boss whose only English vocabulary was the C.S. word.  It was safe to tell my mother that because she didn't know what it stood for!  It was the same with telling her that the actor Samuel L. Jackson is associated with the M.F. word.