Do you swear to yell the truth, the hole truth?

We are awash in unwashed talk waiting to be bleached. Long before Lenny Bruce expressed and acted out, “Swear to Tell the Truth,” Mark Twain had observed, "Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." 

In my generation, it was guy talk, whether in the White House or on a construction site. Four-letter expletives were preferred adjectives for almost anything, to express disgust, dislike or even positive amazement. Today, they dominate pop and rap and are common in the slang of lasses as well as lads.

More than a decade ago, working in Indonesia, I was taken aback when the 16 year-old woman collegian, a soft-spoken soul, who was tutoring me in Bahasa, pointed to the inept street maneuver of a passing driver by turning to me and saying, “Did you see what that f..ker just did?” Astonished, I gently asked, “Nita, where did you learn that word?” “US movies,” she responded. Nuff said!

Certainly, becoming commonplace will shortly eviscerate obscenities of their verbal gutsiness and we will need new sacred or sexual norms to violate for emphasizing what we want to propose or protest. 

I remain curious as to whether this trend is as strong in other languages beyond English, though I observe that it now salts the linguistic fare of many of my ESL speaking students from abroad.