We Are What We Speak - in which I blunder around the term 'potty-mouthed'

WE ARE WHAT WE SPEAK

What does our use of language reveal about the times we live in?

We might consider that we no longer dine but grab a bite to eat. And though it has nothing to do with language, that wine and cocktail glasses are now twice the size they were in the past. What does that say about the post 80s us? Are there linguistic equivalents of those ballooning glasses which offer insights into our era? 

Maybe we are more refined than we have ever been, we have the term potty-mouthed, for example. Could that term, supposedly a protest against coarse language – usually sexual or excretory in origin – tell us something about our deeper perhaps unconscious reactions? What sort of protest is conveyed in the word ‘potty’ which harkens from the nursery or under the bed. Doesn’t it strike you as a repulsively twee expression? The word ‘potty’ draws attention to excretion in an anachronistic and infantile way which suggests an inability to register the natural fact realistically. Potties belong to toilet training (not to be taken lightly) or some quaint world long gone in which our animal realities were supposed to be managed by ignoring or hiding them. The term potty-mouthed lacks the dignity of patient acceptance and the wholesomeness of the frank. It aligns the oral and the excretive (this is the source of its wit) in order to protest a too brutal expression usually itself couched in sexual and/or excretory terms. These brutal expressions are most often of anger or desire – often mixed. It says of our era that we remain anxious about sex and excretion and more - that we are timorous about our right to protest crude and abusive language.

Let’s stay with the intimate, we can talk about blasphemy later. How did we ever get on before beauty therapy, surely the funniest term to surface in our era? It suggests an assumption of a constant of universal individual beauty which merely needs a bit of assistance every now and again. In the preceding era we did have beauticians but they inhabited a sphere visited regularly only by the privileged and were invariably associated with those other votives of the Temple of Aesthetica, hairdressers. Beauty Parlours were more or less hairdressing salons. Now we fortunate many have Beauty Therapists down every dark urban arcade or dazzlingly evident in every rural shopping mall. We are fortunate enough to live in an era which has seen the democratisation of beauty. Perhaps this should be weighed against climate change and the exponential growth of allergic conditions in assessing our times. What does the term signify besides the democratic trust that all who enter these sliding doors are beautiful and that their beauty could benefit from regular attention? This attention is not frivolous, it is almost medical and to be taken seriously, it is therapy as in physio and psycho … and may be more effective than both. It is undertaken by dedicated professionals skilled and experienced in their arcane techniques (beauty therapy has seen the biggest growth in trade training in our era). It is not a procedure as are facelifts and liposuction, it is ongoing, regular. It is gentle, it is most of all benign. It is massage. It is largely depilation, followed by spray tanning and the brushing on of facial tints. What does beauty therapy say about our era? That appearance is very important, a near necessity of life and that the porous boundaries between self-respect and an almost classical narcissism dependent on mirrors and other reflecting surfaces are salient features of our psychic landscapes.

Beauty therapy is the home country of an empire in which tats and piercings are colonies. The latter are not new either but the new dismissive terms to denote them suggest that our familiarity now borders on contempt. Like beauty therapy, these terms and the procedures they denote suggest an insouciant adoration of our physical selves and our profound contempt for, even hatred of our bodies.

Our awareness of our need for therapy is in part a reaction from the huge demands we place on our unworthy selves in order to prove we are worthwhile. Against all predictions of a future in which the machine would free us from labour, we actually work longer hours at greater pressure. We need to be multiskilled in order to stave off the panic arising from our sense that we cannot understand nor keep up with the demands of the contemporary workplace. Though they did not have the term, many workers in previous eras could also perform a variety of tasks. That we have the term multiskilled now suggests a move beyond mass production techniques in which human robots performed one discrete function endlessly to a recognition of the demand that we be all things required at the drop of a hat by the new tyrants of employment.

We are always on the run, something that in previous eras was confined to escaped convicts or those bastards avoiding child support. The idioms we use suggest we are always in a big hurry. We grab, we give it the once over, we dump the kids in the car and drop them off at school, we hurtle over to the nursing home to drop in on Mum before we take in a movie before we keep a date with the dentist. Do we need to declare we are hopelessly busy in order to prove (to whom?) we are worthwhile? These idioms also suggest our brutality and the pressure we seem to need to punish ourselves with.

In the old days we might have collapsed in front of the telly but plasma screens cost too much for such disrespect. The family – her kids, his kids and the dog – are supposed to sit entranced in the sonic-visual anodyne of the home entertainment system or cower from it as it thunders its simulation of war zones and various forms of torture. Does the term home entertainment system also suggest, like beauty therapy, a democratisation of privilege? In previous eras only the very, very wealthy had home cinemas, now many people (and it is increasingly regarded as a necessity of home life) must have a home entertainment system in order to feel they are not living in squalor. Despite the fact we must all have one, the term suggests a certain exclusivity: one does not have to breathe the same air as the popcorn-breathed plebs in their multiplexes or make the terrible effort to drive to one. We can be entertained at home. By a system – nothing spontaneous to upset our lifestyle, thank you. What on earth did people do at home before home entertainment systems? And they are, one emphasises, systems, systems which probably need an expert to set up and regular therapy sessions to maintain so the reality of ocean liners hit by icebergs, war zones in the midst of battle, erotic encounters in torture chambers and high speed car chases can entertain us in the secure comfort and privacy of our homes. The word system seems to have far less value to us than it did for Alexander Pope who wrote

         Who sess with equal eye, as God of all,

         A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,

         Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d,

And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

And before we leave the world of entertainment, what can the originator of the term multiplex have been thinking of?

Are we getting a picture through linguistics of an era where paradoxes of coarseness and refinement, self-respect and narcissism, equality and privilege, necessity and luxury, caring and brutality play themselves out in our idioms?

Child protection refers almost exclusively to the sexual abuse of children, either hidden in previous eras or epidemic in ours. The Rights of the Child – to nurture, health and opportunities to realise their potential seem irredeemably a feature of the hippy days as we jostle to get our child into the school likely to provide her or him with an HSC score high enough to get into Gaming (which is now a euphemism for endemic gambling as well as a term for various degrees of violent conflict enacted virtually and more or less compulsively), or Hospitality (which used to be a grace, not a commercial enterprise). While we all support Child Protection and are horrified and disgusted by predatory pædophiles (now so common as to be simply referred to as peds and spelled with an e rather than the academic Greek diphthong æ), we realise we must trample the children of others into the disadvantaged while we push our own into the best place to get ahead in this rat race. Rat race is a term that has gone because we now accept that is what life is. Disadvantaged as in Disadvantaged Schools is also being faded out because it too clearly points to the massive inequalities in our education systems which, having allowed them to proliferate,  we want now to deny the existence of. Watch for its replacement (or replacements - more than one term will obfuscate the reality more effectively).

Still, some things are better. The term issues, whilst a euphemism for problems, suggests in its wider application that the community has taken on some of the responsibility for assisting people with various forms of disadvantage, many of which were considered shameful in the past. Disadvantaged replaced handicapped but does not itself seem satisfactory, nor does disabled. Issues, in its narrower, personal sense tends to be a fairly despicable term used by whingers on exploitative ‘reality’ T V shows in an attempt to justify their character failings.

Political correctness or P C has become a term of common sense contempt largely through the efforts of reactionaries desperate to sustain the status quo. The oppressed are still oppressed but dare not now protest their state for fear of being humourless zealots. In this spirit Feminism has allowed women to become guys if they are prepared to sink into a mass male identity. They can even be mates but one is nervous of the superciliousness implicit in its use these days – tune in to Phillip Adams. Gay is now a term of early adolescent disapprobation.

And blasphemy? I don’t think the concept has entirely passed from us. The new sanctimony will probably vitalise it. Who for example, could speak of Rapture in vain?

Ian MacNeill