Against Profanity

Writers whose pens are profane do themselves dirty.

Profanity is rife. Fifty years ago, profane language was rarely heard and never written. When it was voiced, it was intimated, usually with an initial sound and the swallowing of the remainder of the word or jokingly with a near homonym. When it occurred on paper, asterisks followed the first letter. It was commonly known that profanity was base.

Now, Joe Rogan and his guests are gratuitously profane with virtually every other word. I heard a speaker at a conference of executives tell hundreds of guests how blanking wonderful it was to have been invited. Writers have now made profanity a part of even their essay writing, if you can believe it.

A writer who pens profanity is no different from a chef who throws his own feces into the pot. Most unappetizing! More importantly, it is a poison. Directed outwards, its noxious effects spread. Who needs that? No one.

My own take on this – reading the writing of those who are profane – is that the profane writer is weak-minded, incapable of strong ideas delivered with concision and profundity. Profanity becomes the crutch which the writer wrongly thinks gives justifiable linguistic emphasis.

Wisdom is never profane. Which of the greatest luminaries mankind has been privileged to learn from have been profane? Was Socrates? The Christ? Buddha? Was Zoroaster? The wise abhor and abjure profane language.

Those fellows weren't writers, one might quip. The point of writing – at least for me, who has diligently studied its greatest exemplars in the English language for fifty years and, in emulation, produced my own written work in their light – is not to spread the detritus we trod in every day, but to transcend it.

Profanity is dirt. Leave it there. Aim higher.