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Michael Elliott (Movie Parables) feels we should be more concerned about the attitude that drives the language. "Words are simply a shell. They are symbols … tools used to communicate thoughts, ideas, concepts, images. A person can be offensive, hurtful, or profane and never use a 'dirty' word. And so-called 'dirty' words can be (and often are) delivered so haphazardly or thoughtlessly that they carry little to no message and are therefore innocuous. As a writer, I find that because 'profanity' is so inexact a form of communication, it is undesirable if only for the reason that there are better and clearer ways to send the messages I wish to convey. It would be nice if today's screenwriters would take a similar view." He finds, usually, that cussing indicates "a lazy, undisciplined or undereducated individual."

If we abandon cuss-peppered works, Chattaway reminds us, we must turn our backs on Shakespeare for all of the "coarse humor that exists in his plays. Much of it goes undetected nowadays, but if people are going to lay down the law with regard to four-letter words (or words that sound like four-letter words), they might want to take a closer look at the Bard and some of his better-known works." He adds that those who criticize Harry Potter's occasional curse should revisit Narnia and Middle Earth. In The Chronicles of Narnia, "The magician in The Magician's Nephew can't help referring to the White Witch as a 'dem fine woman,' and in the first chapter of The Silver Chair, Jill says 'Dam' good of you' to Eustace. Does spelling it 'dam' instead of 'damn' make it okay, somehow?"

Then Chattaway goes one step farther. Shall we censor Scripture?

It all depends on your translation, of course. I remember [a professor] leading a course in Philippians, and talking about a vulgar term used by Paul [that] the New International Version had covered up with the word 'rubbish'; the King James Version's 'dung' was a wee bit more accurate, he said. Essentially … Paul was saying his accomplishments as a natural-born Jew and a law-abiding Pharisee weren't worth s***. Thomas Cahill, in Desire of the Everlasting Hills, translates one of Jesus' sayings, from Mark 7:18-19, as: 'Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him 'unclean,' since it doesn't go into his heart but into his bowels and then passes out into the s***hole?' Cahill says in a footnote that the word aphedron is commonly translated privy or sewer but in actuality it was Macedonian slang that would have sounded barbarous to Greek ears; the NIV, tellingly, omits the word altogether and translates this phrase 'out of his body.' Of course, Jesus probably spoke in Aramaic, not Greek, so what we have is a translation of what Jesus said. But it's still there in the Bible.

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July (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45