Wash your mouth out with soap, Joe Biden. Ditto most of the people I know. And, yep, mine, too. We’ve become a nation unable to form complete sentences without expletives. It’s worse when we talk, but it’s not squeaky clean in writing either.
Biden, who used the F-word during the signing of the health care bill in Washington this week, is but the latest high-profile someone to forget himself on camera. Happened a couple of times during the televised Olympics when open microphones picked up the casual conversations of athletes.
Not that using profanities and obscenities is anything new. The F-word itself has splendidly inaccurate roots in jolly, ol’ England, where supposedly an arrest charge consisting of four words was expediently reduced to four initials because it was easier to write the initials than spell out the words“for unlawful carnal knowledge.”
Never happened, according tosnopes.com– and pretty much every other credible source I could find. The F-word has been around since the 15th century, has almost always been a soap-worthy word, and was first recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1503. It’s probably an English derivation of a German construction.
Regardless of its etymology, it’s a word we ought not be inserting in our conversations instead of“um” and“uh.” An old English teacher used to tell us that anyone whose vocabulary was so limited that he could not craft sentences without expletives should be considered uneducated and, well, low class. Though her intentions are sound, the fact is, in the decades since the 1960s when Archie Bunker first swore in All in the Family, we’ve forgotten how to talk without a peppering of expletives.
It\'s time for Biden to clean it up. He\'s the vice president, a seasoned public speaker and well-versed in working cameras and microphones. I am not among those who profess amusement, who excuse him with"oh, that\'s Joe. What do you expect?" I expect more. Time for him -- and me -- to stop with the potty mouth.
We sure are far away from the days of the Nixon Watergate transcripts filled with their“expletive deleted.” Today? Everyone of those would have been retained. And, if Ed Sullivan talked like Joe Biden did this week, think what would happen to his signature sign on:“…and, now for the really big show.”
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