Watch your language

I hear it all the time walking across campus. Whether it is about the weather, food, drink, friends, family, tests, or whatever, students continually use the same two or three curse words to explain everything about their daily life. The irony of college students, who have before them in classes and libraries (I hope) the richness of Western Civilization's centuries of literature, philosophy, and politics, using the same gutter curse-word to express a multitude of feelings and situations is clear and depressing.

And I have brought this up in classes before, hoping to either shame or make them think about how silly and limiting their speech really is. According to this site, the average educated person uses 2,000 different words in a week, but I am sure, listening to people every week, it must be in the hundreds for the average college student. My spiel goes something like this: The English language is magnificently large and complicated, one of the largest and richest in the world, encompassing over 3 million words. And yet you use, on average, the same 500 words your whole life to express a bewildering variety of moods, situations, problems, and joys. Not only that, you use the same curse word over and over again to express dozens of situations: the weather is [bleep], I feel like [bleep], you look like [bleep], I did [bleep] on that test, last night's dinner was [bleep], and so on and so forth. It gets a laugh but who knows if they take it to heart.

I say all this because a column and editorial in recent days have bemoaned the widening use of the four-letter curse on television. Interesting how Hollywood always excuses its various programs and movies advocating this or that cause because it has the responsibility to lead public opinion, yet at the same time it claims to reflect real life and give us all manner of violence, bad taste, and foul language. The sum total of this, as pop culture makes clear, is that the model Hollywood American is a foul-mouthed liberal. With the college students I hear, they have succeeded in half that quest.