I curse, so I don't believe.

"The cheapening of profanity in modern America represents, more than anything else, the crumbling of belief. There are very few ideas left at this point that are awesome or frightening enough for us to enforce a taboo against them."

I love this quote because it really expresses a lot of thought relatively concisely. Alan Ehrenhalt, in his article "Maledictoratory, The high costs of low language," attempts an explanation as to why cursing is done so publicly in today's world.

I'm curious about what makes a word profane, so this article was actually very interesting to me. I have for a long time thought that it was only one's perception and use of a word that might make it profane. This article made me think again about that train of thought.

Ehrenhalt makes a good point when he notes that any culture needs a certain amount of taboos, if nothing else as "yardsticks by which ordinary people can measure...themselves." Like everything, society needs to see a "good and bad" angle on language. Good language is that which is used everyday in common society. Bad language is a curse word used to express extreme emotion. So why is it that that which was supposed to express extreme emotion is now casually tossed around between friends and family? Has humanity become so emotional in the last century that the casual use of words like f--- and damn is really called for?

Personally, I don't believe that for a minute. The nature of humans has always been to question and push boundaries, and I think that's all the deterioration of the modern language is. Frequent cursing used to only be seen among the "rebels" of society, those wacky kids that got tattoos and piercings in ungodly places, riding motorcycles and having a good time at life, regardless of society's taboos. These are the people that pushed boundaries and questioned what was right and wrong and traditional. They questioned society's beliefs and their own. Ehrenhalt is right when he says that casual cursing is a sign of disbelief. People today are losing faith in religion, in politics, in the general well-being of the world (and the people that inhabit it) around them.

I curse a lot, personally. For me, it’s more like a bad habit that started in 7^th grade. I think I agree so much with what Ehrenhalt writes because it explains why I started cursing freely, and I feel sure that others can connect with it as well. I wanted to push boundaries, to see how true my long-held belief was; that if I did say “damn” aloud, my mother would appear out of thin air, jump on me with a bar of soap in hand, and proceed to wash my mouth out.

Can anyone honestly say that they didn’t start cursing in a similar manner?

It's All Society's Fault.

Frederica Matthewes-Green’s essay “The Bitter Price of Choice” explores the controversial right and wrong of abortion. She offers the new idea that the problem of abortion doesn’t lie with the sexual practices of today’s population, but rather with society’s view of unplanned pregnancies.

This idea is interesting to me because, though I believe in pro-choice, I believe her argument is incredibly valid. I personally believe that abortion is wrong, however I believe in the opportunity to do as one pleases. Matthewes-Green’s argument is true, I believe, because of this: if society did not think this about abortion, that setting aside one small life in order to continue your own life, uninterrupted, is okay, is the right thing to do, then why would anyone do it?

In essence, this argument harps on the desensitization of American society. “Back in the day,” before we saw violence and death regularly on television, before television even, before wars left us stunned and awed, the idea of an unborn baby’s death was shocking. Now it is commonplace and leaves us with no more fear than the fear of radiation from televisions or computers scrambling our brains.

Society can be blamed for almost any problem that plagues the modern populace. Society is why women and young girls are bulimic and anorexic, is why more people than ever before are going under the knife for plastic surgery, is why America’s youth are creating back yard wrestling federations and doing “Jackass”-type stunts and subsequently damaging themselves, is why there is such a high homeless and/or addict population, is why… The list goes on.

Matthewes-Green’s essay is enough to make me consider the problem of abortion further, however it doesn’t change my view of pro-choice. It only serves to encourage my rather pessimistic view that man-kind is its own downfall, that society is crushing itself under the weight of its own expectations.