Pseudoprofanities

When I sent a link to my blog to family, one of my brothers-in-law was disappointed when he discovered that he had misread the link as "pseudoprofanities." Ironically, when I was looking for "pseudoprofundities" on a search engine to see whether it had been used by someone else (Google? Amazon? I can’t remember which I checked), it asked, "did you mean pseudoprofanities?" My wife has her own blog, "The Crockery," which links to mine with the words, "not to be confused with "The Realm of Pseudoprofanities." I fear that if I do not meet my audience’s apparently widespread interest in this phenomenon, my blog will never be free of pseudoprofanity’s pernicious purview. Pseudoprofanity has thrown down the gauntlet, and I have no choice but to respond, "$#$!@$ you!"

"Pseudoprofanity," or "false profanity," implies in its very name a deeper reality, a "true profanity." As Satan masquerades as an "angel of light," so pseudoprofanity masquerades as an "angel of dirtiness," obscuring this vision of vulgarity, this profanity in perfection. As I understand it, the essence of "true profanity" is to express anger, frustration, or disdain through the use of words that the speaker knows are found offensive by a significant portion of society, especially grandmothers. If we are not ever vigilant, we might easily mistake pseudoprofanity for that of which it is but the shadow. I have encountered five distinct forms of pseudoprofanity through my life.

1.Poetic Profanity; or, "Vulgarity Recollected in Tranquility." This is an instance in which a person uses offensive words not to express anger but to serve an artistic or comical purpose. For instance, my parents have an old female cat that (at the time) had some difficulty controlling its bowel movements, so I dubbed it, "Shitty Biddy." For a paper in graduate school, I looked at how the clergyman and satirist Jonathan Swift used bathroom humor in his critique of religious enthusiasts. I concluded my paper with this sentence: "Swift makes no apology for employing scatology because it is an indispensable apologetic tool, a bodily function that serves a spiritual function: it is a holy shit that can demonstrate an opponent’s belief is wholly shit." These are instances in which profanity is employed not to express anger but to say, "Ha ha, look at me, I'm a clever boy."

2.Alternate reality profanity. This is when a person expresses anger using words that they pretend are profane, even though the other people living on earth aren’t too clear on what’s supposed to be offensive about it. For instance, I invented the word "Zoopazix," whose cuss value could only be inferred from the vehemence with which I uttered it. This is also the province of science fiction and fantasy writers. In the recent television series Battlestar Galactica, we see a new humanity which, despite offering us characters able to speak perfect English, has apparently lost the colorful panoply of profanity permitted in America and has only the multi-purpose swear word, functioning in verb, noun, or participial forms, "frak." I keep waiting for them to add "-le rock," but they don’t. Robert Jordan, inventor of The Wheel of Time fantasy series, has interweaved within his epic Tolkienesque landscape a complex curse system that seems chiefly concerned with blood and with things that can be set on fire. It is perhaps most scandalous that some children books inculcate the youth in this form of profanity, such as the infamous Harry Potter books, which teach children curses in Latin.

3.Quotational profanity. This is when you are not saying the profanity itself, but you wish to indicate that some nefarious personage has done so. Sometimes exculpatory dashes are included (e.g. "Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a d–n").

4.Agnostic profanity. This is when the speaker doesn’t realize he is speaking profanity, or is stupid enough to think he is when he isn’t. An example of the former include the adorable little three year old playfully experimenting with rhymes such as "duck buck wuck ..." An example of the latter is the mischievous, devious little boy who thinks the recently discovered word "fart" is that four letter f-word he’s heard so much about and which he will now share with the rest of the four-year old community.

5.Wanna be profanity. This is when people want to say profane words, but don’t want actually to say the profane words, so they say words that kinda sorta sound like the words that actually are profane, except they’re really not. In this way, they think that they have achieved the resolution of the dialectical tension that divides their soul. Of course, they are wrong. Examples include "holy spit," "crap," "heck," and "darn."

-Leopoldtulip