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Vile Words. Within hours of the release of the transcripts, "expletive deleted" had become part of the vernacular. It was used humorously, for most people seemed to worry less about the expletives that were deleted than about the remaining portions of the transcripts. Yet many were shocked and offended by the President's language. Said John J. Hurt, editor of the Texas weekly, Baptist Standard: "It is clear that the words edited out were vile; one can't imagine that a man with decency would use such language, even sparingly, much less have it flow—and flow in the Oval Office."
Blue language, of course, has long been spoken in the theater and on screen and continues to be heard, despite the Supreme Court rulings last year tightening the guidelines on obscenity.
Broadway plays like My Fat Friend and Bad Habits are sprinkled with obscenities, as are popular films such as Mean Streets and Serpico—and especially The Last Detail the story of two U.S. Navy enlisted men escorting a third to jail. Growing numbers of men— and women— are using profanity liberally. Women certainly swear more than they used to, sometimes in the expectation that saying forbidden words will put them on an equal footing with men. All this is a dramatic turn-around from the days when, as H.L. Mencken noted in The American Language, 40% of the coeds at a Southern college deplored the use of the word "bull," and 20% were shocked to hear "leg" (considered an overly physical term for "limb").
Children of all classes and geographical areas are freely using four-letter words, sometimes in the classroom. As one nine-year-old boy in north Atlanta put it last week: "Why not? Mommy swears; Daddy swears; even the President swears." According to New York City Psychiatrist Joel Kovel, children use dirty words "to vent hostility." And, says he, by using expletives for bodily functions and excrement, they "release feelings of sexual excitement."
Swearing, in fact, appears to have certain psychological and social benefits. Anthropologist Ashley Montagu believes that it is frequently more satisfying than laughing or weeping. In his book The Anatomy of Swearing, Montagu points out that cussing is "as old as man and coeval with language."
Dr. Vladimir Piskacek, a New York City psychiatrist who has studied linguistics among various cultures, explains that the prevalence of a particular genre of swearword generally relates to cultural taboos. In heavily religious countries like Poland, Austria and Hungary, he notes, blasphemy is a common way to express rebellion; in Germany, there is a rigid standard of cleanliness and an emphasis on excretory swearwords as a revolt against this meticulousness. In the U.S., long dominated by a puritan code of sexual behavior, a heavy usage of sexual swearwords reflects subconscious anger against prudishness, says Piskacek.