“Good authors too who once knew better words, now only use four-letter words. Writing prose, anything goes.”
Cole Porter wrote those words as lyrics to the title song of the Broadway musical “Anything Goes” in 1934. I wonder what he’d think if he were alive today!
In the last couple of months, since I’m not able to be as active as I’m accustomed to being, we’ve been watching a lot of fairly recent movies on Netflix. Wow! Talk about four-letter words!
Isn’t it interesting that the phrase “four-letter words” has come to mean a set of words written with four letters that are considered profane or vulgar? These include common popular or slang terms for excretory functions, sexual activity and body parts, and even sometimes — depending on the listener or reader — also certain terms relating to hell and/or damnation. Some racial slurs are also four-letter words.
The “four-letter” claim refers to the fact that a large number of (but not all) English “swear words” are coincidentally four-character monosyllabic words. The idea that four-letter words are “dirty” came into play sometime in the first half of the 20th century. At least, it was a common idea when Cole Porter wrote the lyrics to “Anything Goes.”
In 1972, George Carlin was arrested for disturbing the peace when he performed a routine at a show at Summerfest in Milwaukee in which he listed “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” In his monologue, Carlin identified these words, expressing amazement that these particular words could not be used, regardless of context. Before he died in 2008, Carlin lived to see most of his seven words used on a fairly regular basis on cable TV, but most of them are still banned on network shows.
Sometimes the phrase “four-letter word” is facetiously used to describe common words made up of four letters. “Work” is a four-letter word, so is “golf.” Work can be unpleasant, and golf can become an exercise in frustration.
Doug Robarchek of the Charlotte Observer wrote an article in 1993 noting how many politicians have names with four letters: “Ever notice how many U.S. politicians have names that are also four-letter words? Ford, Dole, Duke, Bush, Gore … and how many make us think of four-letter words?”
When I was still in the classroom, I used to tell kids that using four-letter words dropped them to the level of the least educated people they knew, because don’t even the stupidest people use all those words? Why not raise the level of their discourse and assume a position of an educated person? I’m pretty sure that most of the kids didn’t change their habits once they left my classroom, but at least while they were with me they used “better words” instead of four-letter words.
And isn’t it a shame that when we think of four-letter words, we don’t automatically go to words like love, hope, home, help, care, dear, soul, joys, good, give, kudo, true, hero, zest, kind, life, pray and fine, for example? Instead, we tend to think toward the negatives, don’t we?
Did you ever notice that when the comics use a list of symbols (like @#%^&*!) we sort of automatically fill in “dirty” words in our minds? Or when someone gets bleeped on TV, what words do you automatically fill in? Are they four-letter words?
Language is a wonderful tool, and we should be aware of all its uses for good or ill. I sometimes think that movie-makers resort to four-letter words for shock value or to create verisimilitude; they feel that the population uses these words, so in order to be “true” to reality, they have to use them. I don’t think they need to do that.
Maybe I’m just a prude!
