What the !@#%* kind of language is that? It’s grawlix, also called: obscenicon: or qwerty, because of the comfortable keyboard proximity of the letters: Q W E R T Y to ! @ # $ %. Sometimes it’s just called comic cursing. Any set of symbols can be used. Google credits Mort Walker, the creator of the comic strip, Beetle Bailey with coining the word grawlix in his book: The Lexicon of Comicana. It may have been used earlier. In any case, the use of grawlixes goes back to the comic strips of the 1900’s. Rudolph Dirks’ strip, The Katzenjammer Kids (1897) was one of the earliest, if not the first, to use grawlix as substitute for what would otherwise be unprintable vulgarities.
The Romans called the language of the common people: vulgaris - from their word for the common people: vulgus. It is also the root of our word: vulgar. The Romans, like many today, had a low opinion of common folk. They considered the vulgus simple-minded slovenly clods who routinely found it difficult to form a sentence without reference to bodily functions, obscenity, or blasphemy.
This common idea about common people is wrong. Vile speech and its companion, vile behavior, is less connected to commonness than it is to fixation on the tawdry, low, and depraved - a mental failing that results in base thoughts spinning ‘round and ‘round in very small sordid circles. Gutter-thoughts are naturally expressed in gutter-talk. Squalid and stupid walk comfortably hand-in-hand; crude language follows close behind.
You needn’t be poor, uneducated, or lower-class to be bad-mouthed. Rich and well-educated people often prove themselves equally offensive. Poor and lower-class people often prove themselves courteous, thoughtful, and well-spoken.
It’s not a matter of Class. It’s a matter of lack
of class.
Which comes first, crude language or crude behavior? I don’t know, but they are certainly connected. Language and behavior interact in ways not always noticed. As your vocabulary becomes increasingly littered with !@#$%*, there is less room in your head for cogent thought. Obscenities and curses convey emotion - but no information.
If you reproach someone with, “You’re a blankety-blank !@#$%* idiot”, you will have said nothing more than, “You’re an idiot”. Even the emotion is implied rather than said. It is the linguistic equivalent of a dog barking. The speaker is fooled into thinking some communication was achieved. “I guess I told that guy off”. In fact, the only thing communicated was, “I am a boorish lout whose overstuffed vocabulary of !@#$%* does not leave storage space for enough real words to allow intelligent speech, or thought”.
The habit of casual vulgarity diminishes both intellect
and soul.
As you speak, so you become.
Curiously, the centuries before the twentieth didn’t seem to have any use for !@#$%*. I have some ideas as to why. Previous generations valued the pursuit of, “betterment”. They considered it rightfully normal that everyone would work toward self-improvement in moral probity, comportment, education, and financial stability. Polite behavior was linked to proper speech. Then, new ideas crept into the culture.
European Socialists wrongfully conflated their celebration of ”The Common Man”, with coarse speech and behavior. Coarseness came to be seen as the natural expression of, “The People”, more real, more honest; a calumny that remains with us today. Each year, each generation, seems a little more rudely bad-mouthed than the one that came before.
The early cartoonists were just trying to capture the, newly, almost acceptable, fowl talk they heard, but still couldn’t print – so they printed !@#$%*.
Then it got worse, and continued to get worse. Even so, the pace was steady, but leisurely, until the second half of the century. In 1972, George Carlen, came up with a comedy monologue called: Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.
In the years that followed, all seven words were not only said on television, they were said with great frequency. Profanity on TV and nearly all media is now de rigueur. So too, the intellectual vacuity and gratuitously violent content that goes so seamlessly with the potty-mouth dialogue.
Falling is always easier than rising, and getting up is harder after a fall.
As you speak, so you become – or as you behave, so you speak. It doesn’t matter which comes first. The link remains.
One ironic result of our degraded culture is the increasingly infrequent use of: !@#$%&*. Why use symbols when you can swear out loud. Crude language tends to edge-out clear thought. The joy of churlish emotion, expressed in tediously overused vulgarities is so much more fun than reasoned argument.
The dogs howl, untroubled by the burden of sorting out actual thoughts.
Since Shakespeare’s time, many thousands of words which were then commonly used have been lost; words that allowed precise thoughts to be precisely communicated.
Will we someday be reduced to only George Carlen’s seven words. No, I don’t think that, but we are drifting ever further in that direction.
Have I exaggerated?
Not much.
Just !@#$%&* sayin’ . . .
Of course, grawlix is sometimes called for, and completely appropriate