It’s cliché to say that obscene words represent the coarsening of our discourse. The idea is… well, with clichés, it’s hard to say what the idea is, but I vaguely remember hearing a theory that it symbolizes how we’re all so much meaner to each other now, or something.

The natural counterpoint is to deny this is true, but what if, more than that, it’s the opposite that’s true? What if the rise of socially acceptable swearing symbolizes the softening of modern life?

That’s what occurred to me as I re-read the chapter on cursing from Steven Pinker’s excellent /The Stuff of Thourght/–I’m the process of joining the Madison forensics team and was trying to put together a program oral interpretation. For the POI I was just excerpting the introductory remarks about why swearing is a puzzle, but my eyes strayed to his comments on how some curses–in particular, “damn you” and “a pox on you” have almost entirely (in the first case) or entirely (in the second) lost their power. Pinker tries to translate “damn you” in modern terms as “I hope you’re thrown in prison where cellmates sodomize you every night” and “a pox on you” as “I hope you get third degree burns all over your body.”

In a similar vein, he notes that some may be puzzled at why “cunt” is offensive, and suggests we look back to before the age of modern hygiene. Or, why is “fuck you” an insult, rather than, say, “unfuck you”? Because it’s a good way to get a fucking disease or unplanned pregnancy, that’s why, not to mention issues of jealousy or whether the relationship will last.

Mostly, Pinker’s books are a brilliant synthesis of casual observation and carefully footnoted scientific research, but on this last point he slips up, claiming without citation that illegitimacy, sexually transmitted disease, and rape have been up since the 1960s. This is largely rubbish. teen births have been trending downward since a peak in 1957. Rape has also been going down; the fact that this happened alongside the rise of the internet has led to some interesting speculations. The ups and downs of STDs are less clear, but even the ups have a silver lining: a plausible hypothesis is that they often go up because people get careless as we get better at treating STDs (this is even true of AIDS, which, if you have decent access to health care, is far from the death sentence it once was).

So, instead of thinking that casual talk of “fucking” has caused all kinds of social ills, it seems plausible that casual talk of “fucking” is caused by people gradually having less and less sense of how being fucked could possibly be a bad thing. I actually think we have actually reached the point where it only takes a little linguistic finesse to make “fuck you” sound like a good thing, as comedian Lenny Bruce said it should be back in the 60′s.

Overall, the score is this: we used to have horrible words, but our words have stopped being horrible because we’ve stopped understanding what it is for a thing to be really horrible. There’s a sentimental temptation to mourn this loss. No one wants to reverse it in practice. But the temptation to mourn remains.