College . 02/22/2008 07:00 AM . David Sessions

“What’s the matter?”

I address the question to a fellow server at the restaurant where I work, a few minutes into our lunch shift. I’m watching her storm up the aisle of our section, toward the service station where I am waiting for my first table.

She haphazardly tosses an armload of menus into the holster, visibly irritated. “I can’t believe that f—-ing hostess keeps seating me so many f—-ing times,” she hisses, slicing her access card through the slot in the system computer. “She’s so f—-ing stupid, and I’m tired of this s—-. So f—-ing unnecessary.”

As this little mushroom cloud of obscenities might suggest, the overwhelmingly college-aged waitstaff at my restaurant makes South Park feel like Playhouse Disney, as it manages to handily outchart the raunchiest show on television in uncensored profanity. Thing is, the waitress who was frustrated at being triple sat (given three new tables at once) rather likes the “f—-ing hostess.” Even though (or perhaps because) she’s in her twenties, she seems to only know about three words for expressing annoyance—three words that were formerly listed among the most offensive, harsh terms in the English language.

The dream of the crew behind the classic YouTube video outlining the many uses of the F-word has been fully realized. We use it, “loudly and proudly, to describe pain, pleasure, hate and love.” We use it as a transitive verb, an intransitive verb, an adjective, a part of an adverb, an adverb enhancing an adjective, a noun, a part of a word, and—as my waiter friends daily prove—almost every word in a sentence. Today’s generation doesn’t curse like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, it curses like the cast of Knocked Up [NSFW]—profusely, numbingly, and at times with impressive grammatical gymnastics (“How’s life at Buttf—-ingham Palace?”) Displays of verbal genius are not measured by when one drops an expletive, but how—for example, how cleverly one can wedge the F-word into the middle of another word.

Of course, college students are hardly the only members of society who curse. But they do it a lot, perhaps more witlessly and shamelessly than other demographics. So how is it that the generation actively pursuing education is the currently the best known for profanity-laced idiotspeak?

Though the lips of the undergraduate enrollment may be freshly stained with the fruit of higher education, college kids are generally far from being active members of adult society. Once a player in the adult professional and cultural world, concerns of class and authority return unbidden to govern social behaviors such as speech. But by occupying a unique position on the fringes of society, with little actual education under their belt, college students bow to none of the above. Which makes them parallel curiously with an American demographic among whom their favorite four-letter words once enjoyed ubiquitous usage—the old-West, American outlaw.

The caricature of the salty, weathered rebel is one that reaches well into American culture and beyond. In pioneer America and the old West, his crude language was commonly understood to be the result of illiteracy. Frocked women fretted that roaming cowboys stopping at their dinner tables—men of little education or cultural refinement—would quite unintentionally burn the innocent ears of their children. The cussers, thus, were primarily those at the penumbra of polite society—a ragtag bunch little affected by authority, etiquette, or religion. (Hence the swearer’s intimate and antagonistic relationship with the church).

For college kids, like Wild-West outlaws, cursing represents a backhanded stab at expressing resistance to authority and to the annoyances of formal education (there’s something pathetically empowering about calling a professor a “f—-ing idiot” after performing miserably on his exam). It effuses an aura of recklessness and rebellion, terms that describe many an aimlessly enrolled (or not yet inspired) undergraduate. Profuse, witless profanity is a devil-may-care behavior that allows the insistently ignorant to assert the superiority of their anti-intellectualism.

The nagging question becomes whether or not such cultural links between profanity and illiteracy really explains how the lexicon of drunkards and outlaws became the words that an enormous percentage of twenty-somethings text back and forth during class lectures. Can college students really be described as illiterate? Technically speaking, probably not. But compare the conceptions of “class,” and you’ll get a better match. Because just like the horseback-riding badasses whose legend would ultimately fuel the $1 DVD industry, the current collegiate generation has little of what could be called “class”—a willing submission to societal dictations of appropriate behavior.

In a country without a true cultural aristocracy, class is inevitably derived from formal education—a form of “training,” if you will, in which an unpolished human being submits himself to the expertise of the established order. Suffering through the tedious duties of classes and deadlines not only forces people to master themselves, but ultimately takes them to places where codes of conduct are demanded (since, needless to say, codes of conduct in public schools and on restaurant waitstaffs are a thing of the past). And while college students are in the process of being educated, they aren’t yet—in fact, education that translates into maturity and purpose often doesn’t begin until after the undergrad years. So it stands to reason that older teens and college undergraduates, the modern American demographics least subject to authority and least obligated to behave in any certain way, would conduct themselves in the same manner. They’re outside the censoring forces of moms and middle school, the beginner enforcers of “proper” behavior, and not yet under the censoring corporate oversight or the tyranny of public reputation. They roam the outskirts of society, at the mercy of the elements and themselves. Without much sense of “proper” society, what’s the use in using “proper” language? If nothing is sacred, nothing is profane.

As the record shows, sacredness, once lost, is a virtue not easily restored—even if it’s the “sacredness” of something rather profane. And since the youth of the nation do not set the tone of a culture as much as they reflect it, let’s not lay the murder of the English language on their shoulders. Blame it on Hollywood, the porn industry, or uncensored internet dialogue, but most words that formerly induced America to cover its ears have largely been stripped of their offensiveness. Even the nation’s most stylish magazines sometimes color their language to the point that it feels sophomoric and ineffective. (Not that I can really claim a position on any kind of prudish pedestal, as I have long defended the rightful and historical place of strong terms in the educated use of language.) But I wouldn’t mind seeing my generation show a bit more reverence for the power of the sparingly-dropped, precisely-timed expletive.

On the bright side, college and/or periods of post-adolescence immaturity only stretch into the thirties if you’re Judd Apatow. One does not hear too many educated thirty-some things eschewing all intelligent vocabulary out of deference to the F-word. Post-education employment, marriage, children—reintroductions into civil society with its accompanying authority structures and codes of conduct—usually cleans up the act. The college cusser thus sheds his anti-intellectual aversion to adulthood and becomes a truly “educated” member of society.

David Sessions is deputy editor of Kritik.


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