The Supreme Court recently declared seven ancient Anglo-Saxon words unfit for general broadcast on radio and television. All seven refer to bodily wastes or sex. What was found offensive was not the subject matter they dealt with, but the use of Anglo-Saxon vocabulary to discuss it.
All seven words have long-winded Latinate synonyms which are commonly used without producing a blush outside the most sheltered backwaters of society. Anyone who undertook court action against a broadcaster for saying “micturition” or “defecation” into a microphone would doubtless be dismissed as a crank or a fool.
But let the same subject be broached in one-syllable Anglo-Saxon words and the Supreme Court assembles to ponder the implications for the future of the Republic. Very few persons, one suspects, would be much offended if, on tuning in their home tubes, they were to hear someone refer to “sexual intercourse,” “practitioner of fellatio,” “female reproductive canal,” “incestuous male issue” or “female mammary glands.”
In fact, these phrases seem to be bandied about on television almost as freely as “Get some right away” and “Get him down to the morgue,” though, admittedly, usually by goateed men or granny-glassed women.
Something about the Anglo-Saxon tongue has the power to make us see red. Or, in the case of the seven unspeakable words, blue. This may go back as far as the Norman invasion of England when the conquerors from France tried to destroy Saxon culture, and in the process succeeded in stigmatizing the Saxons as crude barbarians. Part of the conquerors’ policy was to impose Norman French as the language of civilization.
To this day, most people labor under the notion that the Saxons were little more than savages, though in fact their civilization was in most respects more advanced than the French. In any case, the Normans won the propaganda war. One result is that when English-speakers today try to sound civilized, they shun the Anglo-Saxon word as nasty and barbaric.
Here the Supreme Court has simply recognized a social reality bred into the marrow of English-speakers. When we recoil from Anglo-Saxon terms for mundane bodily functions, we are probably responding instinctively to 900 years of conditioning to the idea that Anglo-Saxon was the tongue of savages and Latin-root speech the voice of civilized humanity.
The effort to restore dignity to the simpler beauty of Anglo-Saxon has produced a gallery of martyrs, ranging from James Joyce to Lenny Bruce, and has placed innumerable judges in the ridiculous position of having to find legal justification for keeping in step with rapidly shifting definitions of good taste.
It is not only among the seven unspeakable words, however, that the war against Anglo-Saxon is waged. Ironically, at a time when Latin is no longer taught in American schools and is thought to be dead at last, Latinate English seems to be on the verge of smothering American usage.
As in the case of “micturition,” “defecation” and “incestuous male issue,” the use of Latin is commonly adopted to take people’s minds off what is being said. People who transpose these mind-dulling Latinisms into plain Anglo-Saxon English are often accused of being “shrill” and “emotional,” of using “loaded words.”
During the Vietnam war, “bombing” was turned into “interdiction.” Those who pointed out that it was, nevertheless, bombing and that people were being killed were said to be unduly emotional and urged to Latinize their thinking. Admittedly, there were “casualties,” as there would be in any “program of pacification.”
In general, Government justifications for the war were issued in Latin. People against the war were Latinized into “dissidents” with their own connivance. A “dissident” was far less likely to disturb his neighbor than a “war hater.” When “dissidents” wanted to set public teeth on edge, however, they shouted in Anglo-Saxon. (“Stop the killing!”) The American minority who still liked to communicate talked in Saxonic monosyllables—of “hawks” and “doves.”
General Curtis LeMay even performed the commendable feat of condensing the Latin “nuclear” into a sharp-edged new Anglo-Saxon word, “nuke.” (“Nuke ’em.”) After that, LeMay was persona non grata in the Government, which was smart enough to realize that if people began to understand what the Government was up to, it would be in deep trouble.
It is not only Government that prefers to cloud men’s minds with Latin narcosis, however. Even violent Government haters have fallen into the vice. Among angry gun toters who want to build a better world, for example, it has become the fashion to “execute” helpless captives. The theory, I suppose, is that it would seem shrill if you said they had been “murdered.”
It is a rare subject nowadays that can make our blood run cold; but when it comes to sounds, we are all very delicate.