A Semantic Analysis of the Symbolic and Non-Symbolic Functioning of Certain Taboo Terms Used in Three Contemporary Films Thesis

Home , Beautification, Peter Farb

A3 7

A SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF THE SYMBOLIC AND NON-SYMBOLIC

FUNCTIONING OF CERTAIN TABOO TERMS USED

IN THREE CONTEMPORARY FILMS

THESIS

Presented to the Graduate Council of the

North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Marilyn Anne Hurlbut

Denton, Texas

August, 1976 Hurlbut, Marilyn Anne. A Semantic Analysis of_ the Symbolic and Non-Symbolic Functioning of Certain Taboo Terms in Three Contemporary Films. Masters of Arts (Speech Communication and

Drama), August 1976, 225 pp., bibliography, 120 titles. This thesis examines four taboo words (Jesus, God, fuck, ass) used in the films Jaws, Shampoo, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The dominant method of research is semantic, drawing on language theories of I.A. Richards and Alfred Korzybski.

Investigation led to these conclusions: (1) Symbolic use of taboo terms is accompanied by positive attitudes, while non-symbolic use, which is more frequent, is accompanied by negative or neutral attitudes. (2) Casual non-symbolic pronunciation is leading to separation of the symbol from its referent. (3) Through this methodology, it is possible to ascertain the speaker's intent and his attitude toward the audience, but not his attitude toward the referent. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION...... 1

Limitations of the Study Statement of Purpose Foundational Premises Procedure Survey of the Literature Methods of Study Summary of Design

II. METHODS OF PROCEDURES - . - - - - . . . . 26 The Importance of Language I.A. Richards Alfred Korzybski Background in Verbal Taboo III. SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF FILMS . . . - - . . . . 78 Film--Jaws Film-am0po Film-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest IV. SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF PROFANE WORDS . . . . . 91 Profanity--Jesus Profanity--God Conclusions~

V. SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF OBSCENE WORDS . . . - . 145 Obscenity--Fuck Obscenity- -Ass Conclusions~

VI. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS-...-...... 203 BIBLIOGRAPHY. -...... 217

iii CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

"Our sanity is connected with correct symbolism. . . . The abuse of symbolism is like the abuse of food and drink; it makes people ill, and so their reactions become deranged."

Alfred Korzybskil

American speech has been the subject of much professional examination by linguists, dialectologists, rhetoricians, and

more recently by semanticists. These analysts have gradually broadened their horizons to include the study of urban speech as well as rural,2 social dialects as well as regional,3 black grammar 4 as well as white. Yet one area still lacking description is that of clandestine vernacular, a very real part of American speech but ignored in many academic studies. "Veiled language," was Otto Jespersen's fanciful term in 1929.5 Edward Sagarin said simply "dirty words" in 1962.6 Whatever the label, clandestine vernacular refers to taboo words in American English, words not pronounced in "polite society," not allowed in print (not even in dictionaries until recently), and considered "bad" or "dirty" by parents instructing their children. In short, these are the words known to everyone and acknowledged by few. There are several justifications for the scholarly study of this subject: (1) the universality of taboo words among

1 2

American speakers, (2) the persistence of taboo terms over the

years despite continued opposition, (3) the current problem of

changing usage, and (4) the mysterious power with which these terms have been endowed.

Common taboo words are almost universally known. Of the

estimated 600,000 words in American English, only between

10,000 to 20,000 are familiar to the average American,7 but

invariably in this known vocabulary are the "forbidden words,"

for they are learned early and retained throughout life by

nearly all speakers of the language.8 To exempt from examin-

ation only these certain words marks them as having par-

ticular import rather than no import. Taboo words exist in

all regions of the country, are known and used at all economic

levels, at all educational levels, and all social levels. The

frequency of their usage may vary from group to group, and they may not be vocalized by all persons, but anyone doubting their pervasiveness in American speech has only to listen to

Richard Nixon's Watergate tapes to realize these words are part of the vocabulary of the top political leaders of our country. Recent research by Paul Cameron9 suggests that damn is one of the fifteen most frequent words in spoken English and that hell, fuck, shit, and God and Jesus (when either is used profanely), are among the seventy-five most often spoken words. Any behavior as widespread as this is an appropriate research domain.

Taboo words are worthy of study by virtue of their persistence in our language as well as by virtue of their universality. 3

In spite of continual attempts to eradicate them by either

disregard or by denouncement, these words remain part of the 1 0 linguistic competence of nearly all persons in our speech community. Many of these terms have historically not appeared

in dictionaries nor in respectable publications. The educa-

tional system has ignored their existence.1 1 For instance,

two separate studies of verbal taboos among college students

were conducted in the late 19301s,12 and although both claim

to present authentic data, neither study mentions fuck or

shit. Fuck, shit, and other clandestine terms have been

passed from one generation to the other mainly by verbal

speech and "underground" publications. To remain extant

with only minor support from print and with no support from

established scholars, these words must indeed have force.

A pragmatic reason for studying clandestine vernacular

is the present problem of semantic range in the connotative meaning of some taboo words. Though the main taboos of English

are part of the lexicon of all speakers, usage changes. Some

speakers now refuse to accept traditional bans and instead use taboo words openly. Because of this, those whose goal is communication may need to expand their awareness in the area of clandestine vernacular. The objective in communication is the accurate relay of message from sender to listener. Sup- pose the sender says, "I didn't want to go outside in this shitty weather," or "We were just fucking around." Theo- retically, the listener should receive the same message with 4

the same emotional impact that the sender intended. This is hardly possible if the listener accepts shit and fuck as taboo, and the sender has rejected those taboos. The listener hears something filled with emotional impact for him; the sender merely intended a casual comment.

Taboo words are no ordinary words. They are the words

to which we attach the greatest stigma in American speech. When a Harvard lyricist wanted to ridicule the arch enemy of his beloved institution, he wrote, "Yale is a four-letter

word," whereupon 1 3 his song was censored. The forbidden term exerts influence even in its absence and can be conjured up in American minds by the most ambiguous of references. In analyzing the strategy of Yippies at the 1968 Democratic convention, Bowers and Ochs in their book, The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control, said, "The tactic that probably prompted the 'police riot', the violent suppression witnessed by millions

on television, 1 4 was the use of obscenity." The Yippies not only yelled "Fuck you!," "Hell no, we won't go!," "Pigs, pigs, pigs!," but they announced their belief that "people should fuck all the time, anytime, whomever they wish." 1 5 Confronted with such tactics, the police force simply "blew its cool," as the Yippies had shrewdly calculated.

That the obscenity was instrumental in producing violent confrontation is clear from post-confrontation statements by city officials. Typical explanations of police behavior pointed to the obscenity of the agitators usually with a modest refusal to quote the language explicitly. After such a recital, Mayor Daley asked Walter Cronkite the rhetorical question, "What would you do, Walter?" Such a question implies that any normal American would react to obscenity with violence.j6 5

When words can move people to force, their potency becomes justification for their examination.

Needs of the hour, then, as well as academic objectivity and scholarly comprehensiveness demand that more attention be paid to the subject of clandestine vernacular and the way in which it functions in American speech. Dwight Bolinger in As- pects of 'Lag , contended that a task of education is to lead to an awareness of the limitations of one's own language and to a large amount of practice with elaborated codes wherein one is

forced to become conscious of his language and to orient towards the 1 7 verbal channel. To fulfill Bolinger's goal is one of the

express purposes of this thesis which takes certain taboo words out of their usual restricted code of usage and submits them to scholarly examination.

Limitations of the Study

To allow for focus and manageability, this thesis is speci- fically limited to the subject of clandestine vernacular and does not discuss slang, cant, argot, jargon, lingo, nor colloquial speech, all of which may include taboo words but only incidentally.

Furthermore, to avoid superficiality, this thesis does not attempt to cover all aspects of verbal taboo nor all taboo words. Published research on this subject1 8 has usually been

done in broad brush strokes, outlining such topics as origin, history, nature and function of taboo or else providing examples of the usage of specific terms. What remains to be done are in-depth studies which as "why" as well as describe "what." Therefore, this thesis is narrowed in approach to a 6

language study of selected terms as they are currently used. It presents historical data only incidentally. It includes, but does not focus on, the origin or etymology of the terms discussed. Its objective is not merely to provide examples of taboo usage but rather to explore the way in which certain terms are used within a given context.

Statement of Purpose The purpose of this thesis is to examine the semantic functioning of certain taboo words as they are used in three contemporary films.

Foundational Premises This investigation is built upon several basic premises concerning language, educational philosophy, and the place of films in American life. A basic linguistic premise is that language reflects something about the user of that language. "A nation speaks its soul in the words it uses," said Otto Jespersen,1 9 and many years before him, in 1796, D. Jenisch expressed the same thought, "In language the whole intellectual and moral essence of a man is to some extent revealed. 'Speak, and you are' is rightly said by the Oriental." 2 0 It is important to identify this linguistic phenomenon because it is precisely this reflective property which makes the study of language valuable as a medium of learning more about ourselves and our culture. One of the pioneers in the study of the relationship of culture to language, Edward Sapir, wrote: 7

That language is a perfect symbolism of experience that in the actual context of behavior it cannot divorced be from action, and that it is the carrier of an infinitely nuanced expressiveness are universally valid psychological facts.2 1 Attempting to establish the importance of words, I.A. Richards lectured to Bryn Mawr students:

It is little use appealing to the hearer as Berkeley did: "I do . . . once for all desire whoever shall think it worth his while to understand . . . that he would not stick in this or that phrase, or manner or expression, but candidly collect my meaning from whole the sum and tenor of my discourse, and laying aside the words as much as possible, consider the bare notions themselves . . ." The trouble is that we can only "collect the whole sum and tenor of the discourse" from the words, we cannot "lay aside the words"; .- Berkeley was fond of talking about these "bare notions," these "naked undisguised ideas," and about "separating from them all that dress and encumbrance of words." But an idea or a notion like the physicist's ultimate particles and rays, is only known by what it does. Apart from its dress or other signs it is not identifiable.22 To study the language is to learn something about the nature of the speakers of that language. Eskimos, living in the cold climate of the far north, find their language very adequate for communication, despite the fact that they do not have a word corresponding to the English word sin. It may only be a three-letter word, but its absence in that speech community tells us a great deal about Eskimo culture. It was a linguistic experience similar to this that Sapir foresaw when he wrote that some day "the attempt to master a primitive culture without the help of the language of its society will seem as amateurish as the labors of a historian who cannot handle the original documents of the civilization 8

which 2 3 he is describing." Thus, it was in the belief that

language symbolization is profoundly significant that this examination of clandestine words was undertaken.

A basic philosophical or epistemological premise under-

lying this thesis is that man has free will, is a shaper of

his world, and has the right to make choices, but that choice

is possible only in those areas which exist within the realm

of his consciousness. Following from this premise, supporters

of the Women's Liberation Movement employ techniques of

consciousness-raising" since many of their prospective followers have accepted cultural sex roles without subjecting those roles to examination. Once issues are examined, women may choose to side with Feminists or against them or to take any position in between, but until such time as cognition intervenes, they have not exercised their right to autonomous choice but have instead simply been receivers and unconscious perpetuators of the values and decisions of others. Women now extend their questioning to linguistic terminology, asking how significant it is that we have always said history instead of herstory and chairman instead of chairwoman or chairperson.

Blacks have challenged the label g and are asking why black has so many negative connotations in literature while white symbolizes purity, virginity, and "the good guy." Ex- amining the language has led to revealing reflections about women, blacks, and other groups. I expected an examination of taboo language to also yield meaningful results'. 9

C, Gratton Kemp, known for his work and writing in the

area of counseling, was attempting to describe human dignity when he uses these words:

For the individual it is deciding who he will be rather than living by introjected platitutdes; it is confronting with open eyes how power is distributed and used in each area of his experience; it is standing firm and giving assistance to any image of life that encourages construc- tive criticism and espouses responsible human creativity.2 4 (my underlining)

It was in this spirit, man's right to examine and choose for

himself, that an analysis of taboo words was undertaken.

Current movies were selected as the basis for this word

study because (1) they depict spoken language (linguistic per-

formance rather than mere competence), and (2) they are generally

acknowledged to be reflective of American values and standards.

Because movie makers are dependent upon profit, they are under strong obligation to "give the public what it wants." Ernest

Lindgren in The Art of the Film explains this obligation:

If out of twenty million people . . . ten million want to see one kind of film, and ten million want to see another, two different films have to be made, each with a circulation of only ten million; but if all the twenty million can be persuaded to accept the same kind of film, a producer can get a circulation twice as large for a single film, and the additional circulation will produce a maximum of profit for a minimum of expenditure. That is what gives the film industry a constant incentive to provide for the widest possible levels of public taste, and to ignore minority preferences. . . . In no other art is the artist so completely dependent on public ap- probation. A man who is determined to succeed as a writer can buy his paper and write; his other main requirement is a piece of cobbler's wax to keep him fastened in his chair. But a nascent Bernard Shaw of the screen, however convinced he may be of his own ability, will have no chance of making a film unless he can command large capital re- sources. He must convince his backers that the film will 4. . .have the widest possible appeal.2 5 10

Noted filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock affirmed the limitations

placed on him by public taste when he commented, "The art of

directing for the commercial market is to know just how far

you can go. In many ways I am freer now to do what I want to

do than I was a few years ago. I hope in time to have more

freedom still--if audiences will give it to me." 2 6 In other

words, Hitchcock puts on film what he knows audiences will

accept as a reflection of themselves; he can do no more than that if he is to be a commercial success.

Dino de Laurentiis, the Italian producer of films such

as Serpico, Death Wish, La Strada, and Three Days of the Condor, insists that the movie industry is a mirror of society and that

he himself attempts simply to isolate certain trends in which

the public has a deep emotional interest. De Laurentiis was

asked in an interview, "Is your secret that you make films

.8 . .that exploit the fears and meaner instincts of the Amer-

ican people?" The interviewer cited the example of Death Wish

in which the hero takes the law into his own hands after his wife and daughter have been brutally raped, the wife murdered.

He goes about New York entrapping would-be muggers, rapists,

and killer and shooting them dead on the spot. "Isn't this

a crude and simplistic appeal to the baser nature in all of us?" the interviewer asked. De Laurentiis calmly replied that

Death Wish merely reflects the existing involvement of millions of Americans in the perplexing problem of law-and-order.2 7

Thus, according to leaders in the industry, motion pictures are reflective of society's values. It can therefore 11 be expected that the taboo words used in contemporary movies function in a way that is representative of American speech at this point in history.

It seems reasonable to assume that the more popular a motion picture, the more reflective it is of American society.

Since it was deemed important in this thesis to investigate movies representative of the general public, box-office popularity was one criterion used in deciding which films to examine. This inquiry takes a case-study approach and does not attempt to produce generalized knowledge. No scientific attempt is made to compare speech habits discovered in the actors in three motion pictures to speech habits of the entire population of Americans. Conclusions drawn at the end of this study are cased in a framework of suggestion and possibility only. Nonetheless, in order that empirical observations could be stated with some degree of accuracy, it was still considered necessary to investigate the more popular, and therefore the more representative, American films.

Procedure

The movies examined in this treatise are Shampoo, Jaws, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. These were chosen on the basis of their popularity with the American public during

1975 and on the basis of their inclusion of taboo terminology.

In the fall of 1975, Jaws, rated "PG," became the all-time top money-making motion picture in American history, surpassing the previous title-holder, The Godfather. One Flew Over the 12

Cuckoo's Nest made motion picture history in March of 1976 by

becoming the first film in forty-two years to win five top

Oscar awards, Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best

Director and Best Screenplay. All three films were cited by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences for their outstanding scripts. On March 29, 1976, the Writers Guild of America announced their awards for the best written films of 1975: Shampoo and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest were two of 2 8 the four films honored by them. Thus, all three of the movies examined in this thesis were exceptional successes of 1975.

Though the amount of clandestine vernacular used in

Jaws is less than in Shampoo and Cuckoo, Jaws is included

in this thesis because of its extreme popularity and because

it provides a study in contrasts between the way taboo terms

function in a "PG" movie and the way they function in "R" movies. Jaws was rated "PG" by the Motion Picture Associa-

tion of America, and both Shampoo and Cuckoo received "R" ratings. All films shown in the United States are now judged by this group and assigned to one of the following categories:

"G" (General), "PG" (Parental Guidance), "R" (Restricted, or

"X" (No one under seventeen admitted). A "G"t rating means that the film is suitable for all age groups and has nothing which the critics found objectionable in language, sexual display, violence, or any other aspect. By a "PG" rating, the Motion Picture Association wishes to warn parents that 13

the film contains controversial language or behavior and that

they should make their own decision regarding suitability for

viewing by their child. Persons under seventeen years of age

are not admitted to IT"R movies unless they are accompanied by

an adult. "R" films are likely to contain taboo language, or

scenes of extreme violence, or shots of sexual activity and

nakedness. "X" films contain more explicit display of the

things just mentioned and are restricted, without exception,

to persons seventeen years of age and older.

In order to procure data for study in this thesis, the

sound tracks of Jaws, Shampoo, and Cuckoo were recorded on

tape. From tape recordings, all of the possible taboo lan-

guage in each movie was extracted and transcribed. Terms

for examination were selected on the basis of frequency of

utterance and commonality. Originally, the intent was to

limit the study to words used in all three movies; however, this was not entirely possible since the "PG" movie, Jaws,

did not include one of the terms considered most pertinent

to study in Shampoo and Cuckoo.

Survey of the Literature

For this thesis, pertinent literature on the subject was surveyed with several purposes in mind. First, is was necessary to confirm that the topic of this paper had not been previously examined by anyone else. Although the purpose of this study is so narrowed in specificity that duplication seemed unlikely, still, all of the standard indexes 14

were consulted. A survey of Speech Monographs, Dissertation Abstracts, Bibliographic Annuals, the card catalogue, and various periodicals revealed that no inquiry of this particular nature had been conducted previously. However, numerous studies of verbal taboo have been com- pleted, and discovery of their existence confirms the academic propriety of this topic. In 1970, James John Lewis wrote a dissertation entitled, "Reaction to the Concept of Obscenity: Description 2 9 and Explanation." In his research, Lewis found that reactions to obscenity are related to the instruction one received during childhood about obscenity, to a person's attitude toward sex, and to socio-economic status. Of particular interest in this study were the four roles for obscene words which he defined as a Sexuality Role, an Aggression Role, a Rebellion Role, and an Institutional Perpetuation Role. Con- sideration of these roles helped me to clarify the methodology for this thesis. Another dissertation written in 1970 was "Obscene Language and Persuasive Communication: An Experi-

mental Study" by E. Scott Baudhuin,3 0 and while the title suggests possible correlation, further investigation revealed that the study has very little bearing on this thesis. In 1959, Siegfried H. Nothman wrote a dissertation in psychology entitled, "The Influence of Response Conditions on Recognition Thresholds 3 1 for Taboo Words." However, this treatise was experimental in design and clinical in approach and does not correspond to the objectives of this thesis. Robert Joseph 15

Harford's 1972 dissertation in psychology, "A Social Penetra-

tion Model for Obscene Language,"32 disclosed findings that "conversation was perceived as more private, more informal, and more natural when highly obscene language was used than

when moderately obscene or nonobscene language was used."

Such findings led Harford to conclude, "that the recent in-

creased public use of obscene language in this country does

not necessarily representeither 'a decline of moral and ethi-

cal values' or a relaxation of sanction against obscenity.

Rather, the phenomenon can be interpreted as an indication

of a trend toward increased openness honesty, and candor in

interpersonal relationships especially among the segments of the population represented by the Ss in this experiment."

Harford's study was a valuable aid in analyzing social com-

munication in the films studied. Steve E. Lodle's master's

thesis, "Sexual and Excretory Vernacular: A Delineative Ex-

amination and Empirical Analysis of the Nature, Scope, and

Function of Taboo, Inhibitory, Euphemistic, and Dysphemistic

Communication Paradigms," has a different focus than my study,

but contained data pertinent for background to this thesis.

In the field of English, Jeffrey James Henderson wrote "Aris-

tophanes Obscenus: Sexual and Scatological Language in Aris- 3 4 tophanes" as his dissertation in 1973. His paper has little

direct correlation with mine except in the intent to restrict

analysis of verbal taboo to a particular context of usage.

My thesis appears to be the first time that film has been used as the medium in an investigation of clandestine language. 16

In fact, only one other manuscript written in the field of speech communication has combined a study of film with a language approach: Christian H. Koch's 1970 dissertation is entitled, "Understanding Film as Process of Change: A

Metalanguage for the Study of Film Developed and Applied to Ingmar Bergman's Persona and Alan J. Pakula's The Sterile

Cuckoo." 3 5 Koch developed and applied an intriguing way of talking about the transformation occurring in the mind of a film viewer as he views a film. However, his study focuses on the receiver of the message and so has little relationship to this thesis which will focus on the sender (the actor) and his use of language rather than on the receiver's reaction.

Another purpose for surveying the literature prior to beginning this thesis was to establish the existence of sufficient data on the general subject of verbal taboo to provide background for such a specific study within the field. Though not overly abundant, scholarly material is available, and a complete listing of sources is included in the bibliography.

Among the writings which are most comprehensive and/or pertinent are Edward Sagarin's complete book The Anatomy of

Dirty Words published in 1962 and Allen Walker Read's article,

"An Obscenity Symbol," written in 1934. Otto Jespersen's article "Veiled Language" published in 1929 offers an early perspective on the subject. Peter Farb has an excellent chapter entitled "The Speakable and the Unspeakable" in his book

Word Play: What Happens When P Talk; in this chapter he 17

correlates many American linguistic taboos with those of other

cultures. D.H. Lawrence has written on "Pornography and Ob-

scenity," in Sex, Literature and Censorship, and his use of

taboo terms in Lady 'Chatterley's Lover is very instructive.

While verbal taboo is only a partial concern of Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion,

still, his work has become a classic and provides much val-

uable understanding of the way in which verbal taboos and

word magic" develop in a culture. Russell Foote and Jack

Woodward publishedan exciting report in the March 1973 issue

of the Journal of Psychology entitled "A Preliminary Investi-

gation of Obscene Language." 3 6 From their study of college

students two things in particular were helpful in writing

this thesis: an empirically derived set of linguistic ob-

scenities which was obtained and a categorization of these

obscenities with respect to the denotative domains of experience to which they referred. Forty college students were asked to specify all the words they considered obscene.

When their responses were tabulated, the most frequently produced terms were fuck, shit, bastard, and cunt in that order.

A total of twenty words were listed by frequency; this list was compared with words from the movies examined in this thesis. Foote and Woodward's eight classes of denotative reference were also valuable for comparison since this query asked whether taboo words functioned as symbols of their referents or whether they performed some other function. 18

It can be seen by examining the accompanying bibliography

that the topic of clandestine vernacular may deserve greater

scholarly attention than it has received in the past. However, it is also apparent that sufficient works existed from which to

obtain information and background to develop this investigation.

Methods of Study

The dominant method of research in this study is semantic, drawing heavily from theories of I.A. Richards and general

semanticist Alfred Korzybski. Ogden and Richards' procedure

of cataloguing speech into five functions was borrowed, but

adapted to fit this particular study.

Choice of method was made after comparing the various approaches of the linguist, the dialectologist, the historian, the rhetorician, and others. In a linguistic study of the novel, The Snows of Kilimaniaro,3 7 Christopher Longyear listed six different areas of meaning: Logical Meaning, General

Semantic Meaning, Psychological Meaning, Communication Theory

Meaning, Lexicographical Meaning, Word-Mind Meaning, and

Linguistic Meaning. I needed to consider all of these options in approaching this investigation, as did Longyear in approaching his, and I found that a semantic approach seemed best suited for determining the way in which taboo words function within a given context. I am using function to mean how a word serves the purpose of the speaker. Function is a speaker-connected word, indicating how the speaker uses a term, not necessarily how a recipient receives it. In characterizing the fundamental 19

concern of general semantics, Longyear said, ". . . verbal

symbols frequently include emotional responses in our reac-

tion to them; the aim of general semantics is to find what

procedures assure users of language that such emotional re-

sponses can be recognized and avoided."38

Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950) gave the name general

semantics to a new educational discipline, the purpose of which, he said, was to train people in "proper evaluation." 3 9

Human beings spend much of every day in a process of eval- uating (reacting to, thinking and feeling about) their

environment, the events and words and symbols with which

they come in contact. Korzybski found a sharp contrast be-

tween the thinking habits common in science and technology

and those common in other areas such as philosophy, ethics,

and politics. In science and technology, progress had been

rapid and sophisticated, Korzybski observed, but in philosophy,

ethics and politics, progress had been almost indiscernable

and confusion had been rife. Korzybski attributed this variance in progress to the differing evaluative habits which people brought to bear on scientific and nonscientific problems. Those in scientific endeavors were accustomed to cri- tical thinking and seemed aware of their linguistic assumptions.

If the leaders in otherfields would only apply the same techniques, Korzybski thought, our social wisdom might be able to keep pace with our technological advancement. This idealism lay behind Korzybski's proposals for a new discipline which 20

he called general semantics.4 0 Semantics and general seman-

tics are sharply differentiated by Korzybski, but the dis-

tinctions are hazy to most people, including many scholars

who use the terms interchangeably to indicate a branch of

study which concerns itself with the relationship between

signs and reality, and whose goal is the improvement of human behavior.4 1

When Ogden and Richards' book The Meaning of Meaning

first appeared in 1923, it offered genuinely new insight

to language scholars. By many it is considered the basic work in modern semantics. In it the five functions of

language which Ogden and Richards enumerate and claim as exhaustive are:

1) symbolization of reference;

2) the expression of attitude to listener;

3) the expression of attitude to referent;

4) the promotion of effects intended;

5) support of reference.4 2

The first category is symbolic; the latter four are emotive.

(They are all explained in greater detail in Chapter II.)

Because of the nature of clandestine language, every item in the lexicon can be classified as emotive in one respect.

However, Ogden and Richards' definition of symbolic is of particular import and applies to taboo terms in an intriguing way. In order to take advantage of much of Ogden and Richards' thinking and yet to employ a method that suits the category 21

of taboo, the five function listed above have been adapted

for this investigation.

The frame of reference for study in this treatise is

the film itself, as a separate entity, a microcosmic repre-

sentation of life. Analysis focuses on the actors' words, behavior and social interactions with each other and does not often extend to the intentions of the writers, directors, editors or other technical experts involved in producing the

film. What is portrayed on the screen is examined within its own context. My concern is with the interpersonal and intrapersonal communication of the actors as opposed to the communication established between the script writer and the viewing audience.

Summary of Design

This study includes six chapters. Chapter I provides an introduction to the subject, a statement of purpose, survey of the literature, and a brief explanation of methods and procedures. Chapter II contains a more detailed explanation of methodology and provides background on the subject of taboo language. Chapter III presents an overview of Jaws,

Shampoo, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and discusses the clandestine words found in each film. Detailed analysis of individual terms is contained in Chapters IV and V. Chap- ter IV concentrates on the profane words Jesus and God as they are used in the three films, and Chapter V describes the functioning of the obscene words fuck and ass. Chapter VI synthesizes the findings and offers some conclusions. NOTES

'Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity (Connecticut: International Non-Aristotelian LiTrary Publishing Co., 1933), pp. 83-89.

2See writings by William Labov, Roger Shuy, Ralph W. Fasold, and the Urban Language Series available from The Center for Applied Linguistics, Arlington, Virginia.

3 William Labov, The Social Stratification of English in New York City (Arlington, Virginia: Center T-or Applied LTnguTsTcs,1966).

Ralph Fasold, "Two Models of Socially Significant Lin- guistic Variation," Language 46 (1970), 551-563.

4Joel L. Dillard, Black English (New York: Random House, 1972).

Joan C. Baratz and Roger W. Shuy, Teaching Black Chil- dren to Read (Arlington, Virginia: Center for AppTiTd Lin- gustT1s7,T969).

Walter Wolfram and Nona H. Clarke, Black-White Speech Relationships (Arlington, Virginia: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1971).

50tto Jespersen, "Veiled Language," Society for Pure English, Oxford, 33 (1929), pp. 420-30.

6 Edward Sagarin, The Anatomy of Dirty Words (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1962).

7 Stuart Berg Flexner, "American Slang," The American Language in the 1970s, ed. Herman Estrin and odnald V. Mehus (San Francfsco: Boyd and Fraser, 1974), p. 84.

8 Sagarin, pp. 42, 47, 48, 52.

9Paul Cameron, "Frequency and Kinds of Words in Various Social Settings, or What the Hell's Going On?," Pacific Socio- 9gica4 Review, (Fall, 1969), 102-03. 1 0 Linguists differentiate between a speaker's performance (what he says) and his competence (what he knows). The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was the first to

22 23 make this distinction between league, the idealized, abstract form of a given language, and parole, the spoken form made up of utterances by a speaker of tat language. After Saussure's death, some of his notes were combined with those of his former students and published in a book entitled Cours' de'Linguistique Generale, which has now been translated into EnglshbWade Baskin (Course in General Linguistics, The Philosophical Li- brary, 1959; repiTnted by McGraw-Hill, 1966).

1 1H. Kucera and W. Francis, Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (Providence, R.I.: Brown Univ., 1967).

E. Thorndike and I. Lorge, The TeachersWork Book of 30,000 Words (New York: Columbia Uiiv., Teachers College P-ress, 94) 2 1 J.M. Steadman, Jr., "A Study of Verbal Taboos," American Speech, 10 (1935), 93-103.

Edwin R. Hunter and Bernice E. Gaines, "Verbal Taboo in a College Community," American Speech, 13 (1938), 97-107.

1 3Sagarin, p. 137.

14 John Waite Bowers and Donovan J. Ochs, The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control (Massachusetts: AddisoiV~~Wesley, 197T, p. 69.

1 5 Bowers and Ochs, p. 70.

1 6 Bowers and Ochs, p. 71.

1 7 Dwight Bolinger, Aspects of Language (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), pp.~139-140. 1 8See Survey of the Literature, page 13. 1 90tto Jespersen, Language, Its Nature, Development and Origin (1921; rpt. New York: W.W.~Norton & Company, Inc~~~ 1964), p. 29. 2 0 Jespersen, p. 30.

2 1Edward Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of Calitornia Press, 1960), p. 11. 2 21.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York, London: Oxford Univeity Press 96), pp. 4-5. 2 3 Sapir, p. 68. 24

2 4 C. Gratton Kemp, Perspectives on the Group Process, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,197l0~~964T), p. 264. 2 5 Ernest Lindgren, The Art of the Film (London: Bradford & Dickens, 1948), pp. 1S-76. ~ 2 6 Lindgren, p. 17. 2 7 Thomas Meehan, "He Makes Movies that Make Money," The New York Times, July 27, 1975, pp. 1, 9. 2 8 "Film Writing Awards Given," Dallas Morning News, March 29, 1976, p. 28, col. 4. 2 9 James John Lewis, "Reaction to the Concept of Obscenity: Description and Explanation," unpub. diss. (University of Denver, 1971).

30 E. Scott Baudhuin, "Obscene Language and Persuasive Com- munication: An Experimental Study," unpub. diss. (Bowling Green State University, 1971).

3 lSiegfried H. Nothman, "The Influence of Response Condi- tions on Recognition Thresholds for Taboo Words," unpub. diss. (Indiana University, 1960).

32 Robert Joseph Harford, "A Social Penetration Model for Obscene Language," unpub. diss. (University of Maryland, 1972). 3 3 Steve E. Lodle, "Sexual and Excretory Vernacular: A Delineative Examination and Empirical Analysis of the Nature, Scope, and Function of Taboo, Inhibitory, Euphemistic, and Dysphemistic Communication Paradigms," unpub. master's thesis (California State College, Long Beach, 1972). 3 4 Jeffrey James Henderson, "Aristophanes Obscenus: Sexual and Scatological Language in Aristophanes," unpub. diss. (Har- vard University, 1973). 3 5 Christian H. Koch, "Understanding Film as Process of Change: A Metalanguage for the Study of Film Developed and Applied to Ingmar Bergman's Persona and Alan J. Pakula's The Sterile Cuckoo," unpub. diss. (The University of Iowa, 1970). 6 3 Russell Foote and Jack Woodward, "A Preliminary Investi- gation of Obscene Language," Journal of Psychology, 83 (March 1973), 263-75.

37 Christopher R. Longyear, jLinguistically Determined Cate- gories of Meanings: A ComparaiveAnay of Meaning in~Te SnoWs oV~Kiianjro~(The Hague: Mouton & Company, 1970~), pp. 18~23. 25

38Longyear, p. 20, S.I. Hayakawa, "Semantics, General Semantics, and lated Disciplines,"' Re- Laguage, Meaning and Maturty ed. S.I Hayakawa (New York: Harper& Row, 1954,p.26 40 Hayakawa, pp. 26-27. 4 1Laurence Urdang, ed., The Random House College Dictionar (New York: Random House, Inc., 19~7, p. 550. 42C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Company, 1 ), pp. 22441. CHAPTER II

METHODS AND PROCEDURES

"Language is man's most significant invention."

Daniel Fogarty, S. J9

Before analyzing clandestine vernacular found in several contemporary films, it is necessary to explain in detail the semantic theories which underlie the methodology of the study and to provide some background in the subject of verbal taboo. These are the dual purposes of Chapter II.

The Importance of Language

"All of life comes back to the question of our speech--

the medium through which we communicate," said Henry James.2

It is only as we communicate that we develop our own self- images, define our world, and distinguish ourselves from all other animals.

Recent renewed interest in the importance of language has come from both scientific and social arenas. Within the last fifty years a whole new family of sciences has come-of-age: sociology, anthropology, psychiatry, and psychology. Scientists from these fields have revived a concern for language, as Fogarty explained in Roots for a New Rhetoric:

Psychologists tell us that verbal communication has much to do with mental health. Sociologists and anthropologists, searching for solutions to our own problems in the patterns

26 27

of other cultures, have discovered that words can build hatred and that a people's language can tell much of their story, Psychiatrists have found that it is in that mental patient's verbal expression of his trouble that science must look for healing and remedy. 3

Scientists themselves are helplessly dependent upon language

for even the tabulation of their research and certainly for

the description of their conclusions. They have thus experi-

entially realized the special significance of man's ability

to master the development of symbols into a language, as

Susanne Langer confirmed in her book Philosophy in a New KKey:

Quotations could be multiplied almost indefinitely, from an imposing list of sources--from John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, from Brunschwicg and Piaget and Head, Kohler and Koffka, Carnap, Delacroix, Ribot, Cassirer, Whitehead--from philosophers, psychologists, neurologists, and anthropologists--to substantiate the claim that symbolism /Tanguage7 is the recognized key to that mental life which is characteristically human and above the level of sheer animality.4

In addition to scientific interest in language, there has been renewed social interest since the 1930's when the problem of propaganda reached an unprecedented degree of pervasiveness and influence. Asking how it became involved

in World War I, the United States looked around in the 1930's

and saw, in Germany and elsewhere, the rise to power of un- scrupulous demogagues skilled at using the mass media to communicate their propaganda. There was cause for alarm, and growing numbers of people began to look into this concept of thought - formation, the manipulation of people via language. What was it one did with language to become so powerful and amass great popular following? Stuart Chase, in close 28

association with Roosevelt's "brain trust," was one who became

intrigued by such questions. His book, The Tyranny of Words

(1938) was widely read as was S.I. Hayakawa's Language in

Action (1941). Also popular were Wendell Johnson's People

in Quandaries: The Semantics of Personal Adjustment (1946),

Anatol Rapoport's Science and the Goals of Man: A Study in Semantic Orientation (1950), and Irving J. Lee's Language

Habits in Human Affairs (1941) and How to Talk with People

(1952). Due to high public interest in semantics during

these years, an expanded definition of the subject was developed. Hayakawa explains:

Semantics may be defined as (1) in modern logic, the study of the laws and conditionsunder which signs and symbols, including words, may be said to be meaningful; semiotic; and (2) the study of the relation between words and things, later extended into the study of the relations between language, thought and behavior, that is how human action is influened by words, whether spoken by others or to oneself in thought; significs. The word was originally used to mean (3) in philology, the historical study of changes in the meaning of words; semasiology.

As semanticists, linguists, scientists, and otherspur-

sued a renewed study of language, one of the things which became evident was a great deal of historical confusion as to the nature of language. The orthodox Medieval and Renais- sance view was that language could not have been invented by man but was a direct gift from God.6 This was challenged in the eighteenth century by Johann Gottfried Herder who did no research but simply reasoned that much in all existing languages is so chaotic and ill-arranged that it could not be God's work 29

but must have come from man. Speculations date back to the

Greeks who debated endlessly whether words were the natural

and necessary expressions of the notions underlying them or

were instead merely arbitrary and conventional signs for no-

tions that might have been equally well expressed by other sounds. 8

An outgrowth of such confusion was the widespread ac-

ceptance of "word magic," the interconnecting of symbol and

reality and the transference to the symbol of fear, awe, and

other emotions directed originally toward the reality. This

phenomenon, called alternately, "reification," "verbal realism,"

"symbol phobia," or "word magic," is readily identified in

primitive cultures where, for instance, the names of the

dead may not be spoken and a person whose name is exactly

the same as that of the departed thereupon changes his name,

because the similarity will attract the ghost of the dead.9

Sir James Frazer presented an extensive discussion of "word

magic" in The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion.

He pointed out that in Burma, China, Korea, Cambodia, Zulu-

land, New Zealand and Tahiti, among other places on earth, names of kings and emperors were hidden, held sacred, forbidden

to be spoken, banished from the language, and if other words

in the language even resembled that of the reigning monarch,

the language itself had to be changed.1 0

We so easily identify and scoff at the "word magic" in primitive cultures, yet our own society abounds with similar 30

examples, many of them current, such as the use of obscenity

during the 1968 Democratic Convention. In 1939, the City

Council of Cambridge, Massachusetts, unanimously passed a re- solution making it illegal "to possess, harbor, sequester, introduce or transport, within the city limits, any book, map, magazine, newspaper, pamphlet, handbill or circular containing

the words Lenin or Leningrad."1 1 Two years earlier, in New

York, State Senator John McNaboe bitterly opposed a bill for

the control of syphilis because he claimed, "the innocence of children might be corrupted by a widespread use of the term....

This particular word creates a shudder in every decent woman and 1 2 decent man." How is it that we reach the place where the word syphilis creates a shudder rather than the disease itself?

Numerous examples have been documented concerning allergic persons who react merely to the word goldenrod even though the plant may not be grown for miles around or who sneeze at the verbal mention of "hayfever" though they may have been perfectly composed a moment before. What facilitates such behavior? I.A. Richards, Alfred Korzybski, and many other semanticists agree that it is because too little attention has been paid to the cognizant examination of our language. Richards said there is a "common belief . . . that a word has a meaning of its own (ideally, only one) independent of and controlling its use and the purpose for which it should be uttered." 1 3 Upon hearing that the light of the star Arcturus had opened the gates of the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition at Chicago, 31

one woman reportedly remarked in awe, "Isn't it wonderful how those scientists know the names of all those stars!" 1 4

Belief in "word magic" develops as a result of the way

in which one experiences the world. It begins as a child's

natural way to handle his environment, but because it is

childish logic, it can only appear foolish when exposed in

the beliefs or behavior of adults--an indictment of our edu-

cational system for failing to help the individual "put away

childish things" as he matured into adulthood. Fron the point of view of childish logic, it is easy to see that if

the word spider is vividly remembered as part of a whole

complex of terrifying experiences with an actual spider,

the word itself could become frightening. Spider and the

actual creature are felt to be one and the same thing, then, because they arouse the same feelings. It may have been a

recognition of this pehnomenon which caused the FDR adminis-

tration to promote frequent reiteration of the words "pros- perity is just around the corner!" in the 1930's.

Jean Piaget gave further evidence of the way a child confuses symbol and reality in an interview recorded in The

Child's Conception of the World:

"Could the sun have been called moon and the moon sun?" "No ."~ "Why not?" "Because the sun shines brighter than the moon." "But if everyone had called the sun moon, and the moon sun, would we have known it was wrong?" "Yes, because the sun is always bigger, it always stays like it is and so does the moon." "Yes, but the sun isn't changed, only its name. Could it have been called . . . etc.?" "No, because the moon rises in the evening, and the sun in the day." 1 5 N

We smile indulgently as we read this interview and imagine the child's confused sincerity, yet many adults evidence the same sort of confused sincerity. In our culture, the expressions son-of-a-bitchand liar are frequently "fighting words." In order to avoid physical violence, the epithets themselves must be "taken back." We certainly do not change the oppon- ent's attitude by making him take back a word, but it seems somehow important that the word itself be eradicated. Gordon Allport in The Nature of Prejudice discussed the close cohesion that exists between category and symbol:

Just the mention of "communist," "Negro," "England," "Jew," "Democrats," will send some people into a panic of fear or a frenzy of anger. whether Who can say it is the word or the thing that them? annoys The label is an intrinsic part of polistic any mono- category. Hence to liberate a person from ethnic or political prejudice it is necessary at the same time to liberate him from word fetishism. This fact is well known to students of general who semantics tell us that prejudice is due in large verbal part to realism and to symbol phobia. Therefore, program any for the reduction of prejudice must include a large measure of semantic therapy.16 To supply "a large measure of semantic therapy" was the effect, if not the intent, of both I.A. Richards and Alfred Korzybski as they called for a new rhetoric. "Rhetoric should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies," urged Richards,1 7 and, at almost the same time, Korzybski launched his plea for a new scientific language to match the present scientific age.

Though they came from different backgrounds--Richards from linguistics and education, Korzybski from mathematics 33

and engineering--and though their philosophical premises dif-

fered--Richards building from an Aristotelian foundation and

Korzybski adamantly rejecting all Aristotelian principles--

these two men agreed upon many basic principles and certainly upon the newly recognized importance of language as the key

to man's understanding of himself and his control of his own progress. They both felt that it is language which makes a man human, and their goals in facilitating the understanding

and use of language were lofty and idealistic, nothing less than the aim of bringing peace to the individual by showing him both how tocommunicate with his fellow human beings and how to carry on the discussion "of his own inner parliament with himself.' 1 8 The ideas of Richards and Korzybski coin-

cide in areas important to this study, and these will be the basis of my examination.

I. A. Richards

Richards was born in 1893 in Sandbach, Cheshire, England,

and was educated at Clifton College in Bristol and at Magda-

lene College, Cambridge. In 1922 he became lecturer in English

and Moral Sciences at Cambridge and four years later was made

a Fellow of Magdalene College. During these years at Cambridge,

Richards met Charles Kay Ogden. They became colleagues and then co-authors of the book The Meaning of Meaning, published

in 1923. Ogden and Richards worked together on a basic English vocabulary that would simplify the problems of the translator and the beginner learning the English language. While still 34

at Cambridge, Richards wrote Principes of Literary Criticism

(1924),; Science and Poetry (1925), and Practical' Criticism

(1929). In ensuing years Richards taught as a visiting pro-

fessor at Tsing Hua University in Peking and later served as

professor and then Director of Language Research at Harvard

University. His writing was prolific; among his best known

works are Coleridge on Imagination (1936), The Philosophy of

Rhetoric (1936), and How to Read a Page (1942). Richards

was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of

Arts and Letters in 1963. The books which serve as primary

sources of theory in this thesis are The Meaning of Meaning

and The Philosophy of Rhetoric.

From his linguistic background, Richards was absorbed

in delineating problems in meaning. One thing that marked

his rhetoric as new was his use of modern biology and psy-

chology to help him explain the functions of rhetorical

language. Richards observed a fundamental sorting of ex-

perience that was common to both man and the most elemental

types of animal life. "The response of an amoeba to prodding

or the directional growing of a vine is not essentially dif-

ferent from the blinking of a man's eyes in a sudden strong

light or the thrusting out of his hands as he begins to

fall." 1 9 Richards classified the responses of all organisms

into two rough categories: acceptance and rejection. Re- peated and multiplied experience conditioned the sortings

into the habits of growth and feeding. But man, besides the responses he shares with other animals, has a unique kind 35

of response to stimuli of all kinds. He can use language

symbols to express his feelings and needs. He even has a

special way of assimilating and integrating with exterior

stimuli: thinking. Somehow, within his own organism, he can know what he is sorting and make comparisons. Furthermore, he can store away residual traces of his sorting experiences

in such a way that he can call them up again and again at

will, without the original stimulus being there at all. Thus

man is constantly comparing new experiences with old ones, in search of similarity, claimed Richards:

It is important . . . to realize how far back into the past all our meanings go, how they grow out of one another much as an organism grows, and how in- separable they are from one another. I can make the same point by denying that we have any sensa- tions. That sounds drastic but is almost certainly true if rightly understood. A sensation would be something that just was so, on its own, a datum; as such we have none. Instead we have perceptions, responses whose character comes to them from the past as well as the present occasion. A perception is never just of an it; perception takes whatever it perceives as ~~thing of a certain sort. All thinking from the lowest to the highest--whatever else it may be--is sorting.2 0

From this basis, Richards developed his approach to

rhetoric which included his theory of abstraction, his con-

ception of thought-word-thing relationships, his theory of definition, his approach to metaphor, and his theory of com- prehending. Of all of these aspects, Richards' epistemological theory of the operations of thoughts, words and things, is the major source of methodology of this thesis.

"Symbolism," Richards said, "is the study of the part played in human affairs by language and symbols of all kinds, 36

and especially of their influence on Thought. It singles out

for special inquiry the ways in which symbols help us and

hinder us in reflecting on things." 2 1 To clarify these ideas,

Richards developed the semantic triangle shown below:

Thought or Reference

Symbol Referent (an imputed relation)

Although the belief that words "mean" something in and

by themselves was once universal, Richards pointed out with

finality that words have "meaning" only when a thinker makes

use of them. They are instruments to "direct and organize,

record and communicate." 2 3 By symbols, Richards meant, "words, arrangements of words, images, gestures, and such

representations as drawings or mimetic sounds." 2 4 In at-

tempting to state what it is that symbols direct and organize,

record and communicate, Richards found a need to distinguish

between thoughts and things. He acknowledged that thing is

an unsatisfactory term since it has, in popular usage, be-

come restricted to material subjects, and so he preferred

to use the word referent even though "its etymological form

is open to question when considered in relation to other participialderivatives, such as agent or reagent. 2 5 Thus, 37

referent is reality-the thing or object in reality. Richards

pointed out that symbols direct and organize, record and communicate thoughtand not a referent:

It is Thought (or, as we shall usually say, reference) which is directed and organized, and it is also Thought which is recorded and communicated. But just as we say that the gardener mows the lawn when we know that it is the lawn-mower which actually does the cutting, so, though we know that the direct relation of symbols is with thought,we also say that symbols record events and communicate facts.26

Richards' diagram points out that a causal relation exists

between a referent and a thought (or reference). It may be

direct and immediate in cases where we are at that moment in

contact with the referent, or it may be indirect in cases where

a referent exists in a memory. In the latter case, there may

be a long chain of sign-situations intervening between the

act and its referent; for example, if the words were George

Washington, the chain would be as follows: word--historian--

contemporary record--eye-witness--referent (Washington). In

either case, the referent causes the reference or thought

to take shape in the mind. The reference in turn causes sym-

bolization as the thought is encoded into language. But the

last relationship, between symbol and referent, is not directly

causal; it is, instead, an "imputed" relationship. The Western mind tends to see the figure as a triangle and fills in the base

line connecting symbol and referent. However, the symbol does not really refer to the referent except indirectly through the thought or reference. If this "imputed" relationship were thoroughly understood and recognized, it might not do any harm, 38 for reasons of simplification, to imply a relation as we do when we say that the gardener is cutting the lawn, knowing full-well that it is the lawnmower which is cutting the lawn.

However, Richards believed that the imputed nature of the relation is not recognized and that such shorthand as "the word 'mean"' only further implies a direct simple relation between words and things, a false relation which is "the source of almost all the difficulties which thoughtencounters."2 8

Richards' Thought-Word-Thing model is pertinent to a study of clandestine vernacular in two ways: (1) The model explains reification, which occurs frequently with taboo words because they are emotionally loaded words; when emotions run too high, rationality diminishes, and reification occurs more readily.

(2) The model provides a means of examining taboo words to see if they function symbolically, in reference to a referent, or non-symbolically, in reference to something else. This denotative distinction seems important as the first step in in- quiring into the functioning of taboo terminology.

Richards, however, admitted early in his writing that language performs more than a denotative function. "But besides this referential use which for all reflective, intellectual use of language should be paramount," he said, "words have other functions which may be grouped together as emotive."2 9

Richards characterized the differencesin usage:

In symbolic speech the essential considerations are the correctness of the symbolization and the truth of the references. In evocative speech the essential 39

consideration is the character o theattitude aroused. . . . the words Truth(sf and Truth(e) are totally distinct as symbols, the first being defined in terms of reference, while the second is equivalent to appropriate and genuine, and does not involve reference.3 0

Richards divided emotive speech into four categories:

(1) attitude toward the audience, (2) attitude toward the referent, (3) intended effect on the audience, and (4) support of reference. These four, together with strict symbolization, make up the five functions of speech which he claimed are exhaustive.

Richards was not suggesting that any given element of speech can be placed neatly into one and only one of his five categories. His awareness of the complexity of man precluded any such simplistic conclusion and prompted him repeatedly to remind his readers that "speech on almost all occasions presents a multiple, not a single, sign-situation",,31

Since man possesses the characteristic abilities of each of the animal forms from the simplest to the most complex, he can put all these abilities to work in reaction to a given stimulus. His response can be, at one and the same time, biological, emotional, and conceptual. When he does conceptualize a response, he can express it in language symbols. There is a complexity here, because the biological, emotional, and conceptual elements in the response fight for dominance at one another's expense.3 2

Richards felt that ideal speech would be a perfect blend of all five functions operating simultaneously, but admitted,

"Only occasionally will a symbolization be available which, without loss of its symbolic accuracy, is also suitable (to the author's attitude to his public), appropriate (to his referent), judicious (likely to produce the desired effects) and personal (indicative of the stability or instability of 40

his references). The odds are very strongly against there being many symbols able to do so much." 3 3

Alfred Korzybski

Most of the prominent thinkers associated with the field of

semantics--I.A. Richards, Charles K. Ogden, Bertrand Russell, A.

N. Whitehead, Rudolf Carnap, Philipp H. Frank--and also those who popularized the discipline--S.I. Hayakawa, Wendell Johnson, Irving J. Lee--were associated with traditional academics. Nearly all were professors of philosophy, linguistics, literature, speech, or psychology. The exception was Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950), a Pol- ish mathematician and engineer who served as an officer in the Rus- sian army in World War I and later as a League of Nations official.

Korzybski never joined a university faculty; instead, an educational institution of a special kind, the Institute of General Semantics, was built around him. His work had remarkable impact on a wide range of people, primarily because it caught the fancy of a number of keen, active men such as Stuart Chase, S.I. Hayakawa, Wendell

Johnson, and Irving J. Lee, who saw the practical implications of his theories and translated them into "lay" language in their books.

Viewing the twentieth century world around him, Korzybski concluded that a vast chasm existed between scientific and prescientific times. Man, he argued, had learned his method of structuring thoughts into words and sentences in prescientific times. His thought and language habits had been appropriately prescientific in a prescientific age. 3 4 However, recent discoveries in mathematics, physics, biochemistry, psychology, and psychiatry had vastly changed man's world. In his scientific maturity, man 41

needed a new scientific language, a way of structuring his

thoughts into words that took into account all new things he had found out.35

Korzybski set for himself the task of analyzing the

structure of language (ranging from the language of the in-

sane to that of the mathematical physicist) and of relating

that structure to human behavior, to a theory of culture, 3 6 and of history. Korzybski was concerned with much more

than the semantic meaning of words. His theories embraced all of life and ultimately could be used, Korzybski claimed,

in psychotherapy to promote sanity. He maintained that while

semantics belongs to the philosophy of language and perhaps

to the theory of knowledge, general semantics belongs to em-

pirical science and is the foundation of a science of man,

the basis of the first "non-aristotelian system," which has

had no predecessor and which no academic semanticist has ever

achieved.37 Korzybski's claims of an empirical science are not supported by others in the field, though few deny the

validity of his theories. In stating that sanity is con-

nected with language, Korzybski seems to support the Whorf- Sapir hypothesis3 8 that language is not only a reflection

of the attitude of the user but also helps shape that attitude.

Korzybski gave the example of the difference between a man

saying to himself, "I have failed three times," versus saying, "I am a failure!" It is the difference, Korzybski said, between sanity and self-destruction, 39 Korzybski's thinking 42

may have direct applicability on verbal taboo and the influ-

ence it has on the speakers who use it. This will be explored

later in this chapter and in Chapter VI.

Korzybski's system is built on three basic principles:

(1) non-identity, (2) non-allness, and (3) reflexiveness.

These may be metaphorically phrased: (1) the map is not the

territory (words are not the things which they represent),

(2) the map does not represent all of the territory (words

cannot say all about anything), and (3) a map is self-

reflexive in that an ideal map would have to include a map

of itself which in turn would have to include a map of the

map (it is possible to speak words about words, words about

words about words, and so on, indefinitely).

The principle of non-identity is the most applicable

to this thesis and has to do with the relationship between

the subject and the object of a proposition when they are

joined by the verb to be. For Korzybski, the essential flaw

in the Aristotelian system was the use of the "is" of identity

in this circumstance.41 Korzybski warned people to guard against

confusing words and things, verbal descriptions and actual

events. This, of course, is the same warning Richards was

sounding. Hayakawa explained, "The common injunction to

'call a spade a spade' has the profoundly misleading impli-

cation that we call it a spade because that's what it is. 'Pigs are rightly called pigs because they are such dirty

animals."'4 2 Fogarty further explained the non-identity principle: 43

When we say, "this is a pencil," the statement is un- conditionally false to facts, because the object appears as an absolute individual and is not words. Korzybski means that nothing said or~wrTtien, no word or symbol or description can be the extended, physically real pencil. For him, it is 'impossible to cross the line from the verbal, symbolic order to the real, physical, extended order via the "is" of identity. Nothing in the verbal order can possibly be identical with anything in the real order. To avoid this flaw which, he feels, creates a "semantic blockage," Korzybski suggests the use of the strictly predicative "is," which does not try to connect by identity, does not try to say what a thing is, but rather says something about it.43

Korzybski further advocated that one's attitude toward

things and relations ought to be extensional as opposed to

intensional. That is, one should seek the real as opposed

to the mental. Semanticist Anatol Rapoport said, "To be

extensional is to be aware of things, facts, and operations

in the way they are related in nature instead of in the way

they are talked about. The extensionally oriented person

differentiates better than the word-minded (intensionally

oriented) one."44 Differences in communication should be

settled by extensional seeking of reality, stopping to identify

and agree upon the referent. However, this happens too infre-

quently, and instead, discussion often becomes more and more

intensional, going from abstraction to higher abstraction and' never to meaningful communication.

Words are not things, and things are far too complex and

rich to be expressed by words in any adequately factual way.

On these points, both Richards and Korzybski agreed. Both felt

the historical confusion of symbol and referent had led to many

difficulties. Richards' semantic triangle and Korzybski's 44 principle of non-identity provide semantic basis for recog- nizing when words are being employed symbolically and when they are not.

Korzybski recognized that words function in ways other than denotatively, just as did Richards. Korzybski used the term presymbolic to describe the emotive functioning of words, as Hayakawa explained:

What complicates the problems of interpretation above all is that often words are not used informatively at all. In fact, we have every reason to believe that the ability to use noises as symbols was developed only recently in the course of our evolution. Long before we developed language as we know it, we probably made, like the lower animals, all sorts of animal cries, expressive of such internal conditions as hunger, fear, triumph, and sexual desire. . . . But, although we developed symbolic language, the habit of making noises x i rather than reporting, our internal conditions has remained. The result is that we use language in presymbolic ways. . . . These presymbolic uses of language coexist with our symbolic systems, and we still have constant recourse to them in the talking we do in everyday life.4 5

Symbolic language is instrumental in character; that is, it is instrumental in getting work done, persuading the listener to formulate the reference intended by the speaker.

Presymbolic language, on the other hand, expresses the feelings of the speaker and is an activity in itself, pleasurable or not, as the case may be. Symbolic language informs the listener; presymbolic language affects the listener.

Hayakawa said, "Presymbolic uses of language have this characteristic in common: their functions can be performed, if necessary, without the use of grammatically and syntactically articulated symbolic words." 4 6 Presymbolic words do not have 45

extensional content. "Their principal function is to indi-

cate the approval or disapproval felt by the speaker, al-

though, to be sure, they often indicate at the same time the reasons for those feelings." 4 7

Whether taboo words have extensional content or not

will be a focal point in this thesis. Clandestine terms

in the films will be analyzed to determine whether they

function symbolically or presymbolically, whether their

purpose seems to be to inform or affect. If the taboo

words fit the category of presymbolic language, what sort

of emotions do they seem designed to convey? Do they seem

to be chosen for their effect on the listener or on the

speaker? Such questions will form the outline of investigation in this thesis.

Presymbolic language, as defined by Korzybski and ex- plicated by Hayakawa, is often a part of the vocabulary of

today's political agitators. Mary G. McEdwards in her article, "Agitative Rhetoric: Its Nature and Effect," showed how powerful such affective language can be. According to the article, the objective of the agitator is to "stir up the whole atmosphere," 4 8 and this he does via his language.

McEdwards contrasted rational (symbolic) use of language with affective (and sometimes non-symbolic or presymbolic) use of language:

Comments on the inequity of our government's actions in Viet Nam such as "to engage in the large-scale killing of people when it is not in the best interest of their country, but of ours, is a grossly immoral 46

act," made by physics professor William C. Davidson of Haverford College to a Time reporter, do not upset anyone (except possibly the administrators of his college, and usually for reasons not related to the content of the comments). Yet, when students parading in front of the White House shout in unison, "Hey, hey, L.B.J.! How many kids did you kill today?" and when this chant is reported in the newspapers and magazines, the public is shocked into identifying with the physical battles in Viet Nam. The unexpected vocabulary level of "L.B.J." instead of "President John- son," the sassy "hey, hey" directed at the highest official in the land, and the diction of "kids" in place of "young men" or "soldiers" mark this chant as agitative rhetoric.4 9

In Korzybskian terminology, the physics professor used symbolic language that was instrumental in intention. The parading students used affective language (with some presymbolic terms such as Hey, hey) that expressed their strong internal feelings. The professor sought to inform; the students sought to arouse. No doubt exists as to which approach was more effective; the success of agitative rhetoric in recent years is one more reason to study carefully the symbolic and emotive functions of language.

The confusing of words with things, and symbolic functioning with emotive functioning, has led to vast overall chaos in the area of verbal taboo. For example, why was the public so outraged when Lenny Bruce mentioned cock-sucking on stage?

Was the word the cause of outrage? Was it the impropriety of a private thing made public? Was it the denotative quality of the word? What was the objection to the Yippies advocating free and unrestrained fucking? The word? The act? The im- modesty of mentioning it in public? Apparent confusion between symbol and reality still exists in the realm of verbal taboo. 47

It has been established that both Richards and Korzybski presented theories to dispel the old beliefs in "word magic" and that both men recognized the multi-functioning of words as denotative symbols and/or as emotive symbols. These semantic concepts form the basis for the examination of taboo words in this thesis.

Background in Verbal Taboo

As a prelude to the examination of taboo words in three films, some consideration of the general background of verbal taboo is necessary. Definitions are needed, as well as some sense of historical and cultural perspective.

The word taboo, or tabu, was borrowed from Tongan, a language of Polynesia, and meant "set apart, inviolable."

The English definition concentrates on the proscription of that which is set apart, the avoidance of particular kinds of behavior which are unacceptable to society. Verbal taboo is the avoidance of certain verbal symbols which have been proscribed as unacceptable to society.

Verbal taboo refers to a small number of English terms and not to the many times when it is situationally inappropriate to verbalize certain thoughts or ideas. For example, one may not shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre and have it condoned by those in attendance. Freedom of speech does not extend to such an act because of social considerations. How- ever, it is not the word fire which is prohibited but only its use in that context, under those circumstances, because it does 48 not correspond with truth nor reality, Such is not a linguistic taboo, but a sociological one. Verbal taboo concerns itself with linguistic taboos, taboos of word sound. Some- times a sound combination is absolutely proscribed by society; regardless of the context in which it is used, regardless of whether it symbolizes the referent, it may never be pronounced. In other instances, the sound combination is not completely banned from the language, but is utterable only under certain special conditions, in given circumstances, or sometimes only by particular persons.

Universality of Taboo

Taboo pre-dates English and is a universal phenomenon.

Peter Farb, in his recent book Word Play: What Happens When

People Talk, claimed, "Every human society around the world prohibits certain kinds of behavior and certain categories of words, although those prohibited in one society may turn out to be the norm in another." 5 0 "It is a classic anthropological fact," said psychologists Foote and Woodward, "that all societies sanction certain implicit or explicit inhibitions of behavior or linguistic expression--that is, all societies exhibit the well-known phenomenon of taboo."5 1 English, it appears, is not the only language with "dirty words' nor the only culture where mothers wash out children's mouths with soap for verbal transgressions. In An Anatomy of Dirty Words,

Sagarin referred to verbal taboo in folk and primitive societies; 49

The tabooed word was not unknown in folk societies, nor among those groups of people living under what has variously been termed primitive, preliterate or

unsophisticated conditions. . a . Frequently, among such groups, there were proper names that could not be spoken. In almost all societies, people are known by individual names, the word or sound formation by which they are called throughout their lives. But among some preliterate groups, no sooner does a man marry than he can no longer say the name of his wife's mother a taboo that may follow him throughout his life.5

This particular ban was substantiated by Sir James

Frazer, the widely recognized authority on the taboos of primitive society. A Caffre man, wrote Frazer, "may not mention the name of his mother-in-law, and the restriction is mutual: she may not pronounce the name of his mother." 5 3

But his wife is even more severely restricted, for she "is forbidden to pronounce even mentally the names of her father- in-law and of all her husband's male relatives in the ascending line; andwheneverthe emphatic syllable of any of their names occurs in another word, she must avoid it by substituting either another term or another syllable in its place." 5 4

It is interesting that this tribe prohibits even mental symbolization. One wonders at the reinforcement mechanisms available to assure compliance with such a proscription. Yet, this behavior is no different from that of some contemporary societies, American included, where children are instructed not even to think "dirty words." Adherence to such commands may be due to the psychological power the instructor holds over the instructee and to the disparity between the two in size and cognitive ability. The English linguistic authority, 50

Leonard Bloomfield, pointed out that the male Cree Indian does not speak the names of his sisters and of some other female relatives, explaining the avoidance by saying, "I respect her too much." 5 5

The phenomenon of verbal taboo, of setting apart certain symbols which are unacceptable, does indeed appear to be universal in its pervasiveness. One might almost say,

"In the beginning was the word . . . and soon after came thetaboo word." Ever since man has been using language, he has also been tacitly avoiding certain stigmatized symbols in that language. Jespersen said, "Learning a language implies among other things learning what you may not say in the language, even though no reasonable ground can be given for the prohibition." 5 6

Cause of Taboo

Superstitious fear led to the establishment of many verbal taboos. People feared that pronouncing the names of deities, rulers, enemies, or evil spirits would somehow invoke their wrath and/or cause them to materialize. One way to avoid that which is not understood is to refuse it verbal mention in the fallacious belief that to ignore something is to refute its existence. Death is not understood; therefore, it often becomes a taboo subject. Deities and rulers are powerful and often must be feared and appeased.

Allen Walker Read felt that the taboos on sexual terms ori- ginated because of fear also. "The psychological motivation 51

for taboo lies deep," he said, "and probably has its root in

the fear of the mysterious power of the sex impulse. Primi-

tive man found that the force of passion could so disorder

life that he hedged it about with interdicts and prohibitions.

Because of these, sexual fetishes or symbols developed. For

most people, the bare word forms of these four-letter words have become sexual fetishes." 5 7

Linguists, dialectologists, and semanticists agree that

superstitious fears are the basis of taboo for the unsophis-

ticated man. However, modern man, priding himself on his

sophistication in a scientific age, needs another, more ra-

tional explanation for verbal taboo. Chapter VI will list

briefly various explanations for the existence of verbal taboo. Suffice to say here that verbal taboo generally operates at

a pre-cognitive or irrationallevel, even for rational sophis-

ticates, i.e., the taboo is accepted by most people pre-

cognitively and remains an unexamined part of the person

throughout life. The average person neither gives conscious

consent to the taboos of his culture nor consciously rejects

those taboos; he merely accepts them and in turn perpetuates

them by explaining to his own children, "It is not a nice word. We do not say it in our family." Whatever the original basis for English taboos, the cause of their perpetutation now is self-reflexive; they are taboo because we were taught

they are taboo.

Read explained that verbal taboo, "is the result of training from early childhood . . . the result of experiences 52 during the impressionable age--the hushed awe that surrounds these words, the refusal of information concerning them, or the punishment meted out for an inadvertent use of them.

There develops a neurosis so ingrained that the will is well- nigh powerless against it. Even when we come to know that there is not a proper basis for the feeling, we are prompted by motivations so deeply planted that we have the reactions in spite of our intellect." 5 8 This explanation corresponds with Read's definition of verbal taboo as, "any word which gives to anyone a certain emotional reaction, that of a

'fearful thrill' in seeing, doing, or speaking the forbidden.

. . . That is to say, the response is an emotional one, altogether out of proportion to the simple semantic content of the word." 5 9 Thus, Read determined whether or not a word should be classified as taboo by observing the reaction it generated in either the speaker or the listener.

Commonality of Taboos

Although there are idiosyncratic taboos peculiar to a certain culture, particularly in the case of isolated primitive tribes, there are also common taboos evidenced by the majority of cultures. Interestingly enough, the commonality of these terms is found not in sound formation, but in subject reference. Foote and Woodward testified to this fact:

It seems that with few exceptions all known modern tongues contain a certain, relatively small subset of words among all the lexical items of their voca- bularies that would be identified by the typical 53

native speakers of these languages as obscene, dirty, etc. Furthermore, another aspect of the universality of this linguistic phenomenon is the fact that the obscene lexical items from those many different languages seem to refer to a rather limited number of categories of psychological and social experience. Although there seems to be differential emphasis across languages upon one or another of these categories, it has been suggested by Vetter than verbal obscenities may be classified rather completely with respect to a quite limited number of major domains of experience: (a) words and actions relating to sex and excretion, (b) blasphemy and profanity, (c) animal abuse. 6 0

Total taboo exists on sexual and excretory terms; that is, these terms are unacceptable regardless of the circumstances under which they are pronounced. Partial taboo exists on blasphemous terms and terms of animal abuse; that is, these terms are acceptable when used symbolically to point to their referents but unacceptable when used non-symbolically. Both

Cameron and Foote and Woodward found in their recent research that terms falling in Vetter's first two categories, (a) sexual and excretory, and (b) blasphemous, are far more common and far more taboo than terms falling in the third category of

(c) animal abuse. The only term used frequently in the third category is bitch uttered either in isolation or in conjunction with the label son-of-a-bitch. Since the most frequent taboo words in films are either obscene or profane, this thesis will concentrate on these two categories. Profane or blasphemous terms have religious inference and include God, damn, hell, and Jesus Christ. Obscene terms pertain in some way to sex (fuck, screw, bastard), or excretion (shit, piss), or to organs of the body most directly concerned with these two functions

(cock, pri1k, cunt, ass). 54

Pro fanjity

One of the strongest influences on English profanity today

dates back to 'Biblical times when Moses went to Mount Sinai and

received as one of the Ten Commandments, "Thou shalt not take

the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not

hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain" (Exodus 20:7).

This proscription was accepted into the Judeo-Christian tradi-

tion and remains in force today. Since violation of the com-

mand carries with it threat of punishment, one understands why the taboo has been perpetuated over the years.

English speakers extend this commandment to include the

name of Jesus as well as God and therefore do not name their

children Jesus. Jesus is used either reverently in reference

to the deity, or profanely in violation of the taboo, but not

casually. On the other hand, Spanish-speaking people often

name their children Jesus, thus causing distress to those Eng-

lish speakers who take the taboo seriously.

In addition to God and Jesus Christ, the words damn and

hell also are reserved for religious use in the English lan-

guage and become profanity when used "in vain," apart from

their ecclesiastical context. The word profane means "unholy,

not devoted to religious purposes." Obviously, profane words

are not banned completely from the language. When these same words are used religiously they are perfectly acceptable.

Such rules of the English speech community find parallels in many other societies where ecclesiastical terms are sanctified 55 for sacred use only, Farb gave an excellent account of the

Zuni Indians of New Mexico who differentiate three levels of speech-conversational, sacred, and frivolous-and rigidly insist upon appropriate usage. Young Zunis do not usually understand the full implications of the sacred words, They know only that certain terms have been accorded sacred usage and that it is proper to speak them at certain times and places. "A young Zuni learns, for example," reported Farb,

"that it is particularly bad taste to utter the word takka meaning 'frogs,' during a ceremony. The proper way for him to say 'frogs' in a religious context is to use a string of words that means, literally, 'several-are-sitting-in-a-shallow- basin-where-they-are-in-liquid. 061

In American society it is appropriate to speak of God, the deity, with a capital G, or even god with a small g as in "his gods are money and materialism." It is all right to say, "Those who do not believe in Jesus Christ will be damned to everlasting hell," or even "being in prison camp was three years of hell-on-earth." In all these instances, the terms retain their religious meaning.

Profanity, then, is the irreligious use of religious terminology. The terminology itself is acceptable. It seems obvious that an individual's views on profanity will be influenced by his theological views and his intellectual and emotional beliefs about God and Christianity. A Funda- mentalist Christian will resist all efforts to neutralize 56 the accepted terms of profanity. He does not want the name of the one whom he worships used casually. He might almost prefer that it be used angrily in violation of the taboo rather than casually in rejection of the taboo. Even after conscious examination of the subject, such a person may vote to retain the bans of profanity because it is not only the words which are taboo for casual treatment, but also the religious concepts which they represent. It is not the word God which is sacred to the believer, but the concept symbolized by the word. One way of holding the concept sacred may be to hold the word sacred. The agnostic and the atheist may reach the opposite conclusion, of course.

Since the concept is not sacred to them, they may ask, "Why keep the words sacred by accepting the traditional taboo?"

Obscenity

One of the contrasts between profanity and obscenity is that profane words are acceptable when used appropriately

(religiously), but obscene words are usually not acceptable under any conditions. Fuck is unacceptable when used non- biologically as in "fuck you," but it is also unacceptable when used denotatively to describe the biological act of sexual intercourse. Shit and piss are also unacceptable regardless of context. Most obscenities are taboo in both biological and non-biological usage, and thoughtful scholars may rightfully ponder the implications of this phenomenon.

If an individual's views on profanity are influenced by his 57 theological views, then it should follow that one's views on, obscenity are influenced by his views on sex, excretion, and the human body. The theist preserves the bans on profanity because he holds the concept of God sacred. If the concepts of sex and the human body were sacred, then verbal taboos should extend only to the non-sacred use of obscenities.

If the concepts of sex and the human body were neutral or biological, why would verbal taboos exist at all? The words piss and shit certainly produce different emotional reaction in listeners than do the words expectorate, spit, belch or burp. Harry Clor, concerned with the legal aspects of obscenity, offered an explanation in Obscenity and Public Morality: Cen- sorship in a Liberal Society.6 2 Although dictionary definitions of the term obscenity usually trace its etymology to

Latin ob-caenum, meaning "filth," Havelock Ellis and other writers hold that the term originally designated that which is "off the scene"--not to be openly shown on the stage of life.63 This latter definition Clor pursued and expanded:

Obscenity consists in making public that which is private; it consists in an intrusion upon intimate physical processes and acts or physical-emotional states; and (2) it consists in a degradation of the human dimensions of life to a sub-human or merely physical level. According to these definitions, obscenity is a certain way of treating or viewing the physical aspects of human existence and their relation to the rest of human existence. Thus, there can be an obscene view of sex; there can also be obscene views of death, of birth, of illness, and of acts such as that of eating or defecating. Obscenity makes a public exhibition of these phenomena and does so in such a way that their larger human context is lost or depreciated. Thus, there 58

is a connection between our two preliminary definitions of obscenity: when the intimacies of life are exposed to public view their human value may be depreciated, or they may be exposed to public view in order to depreciate them and to depreciate man. 6 4

Clor went on to contend that people have a certain sense of specialness about those bodily functions each must perform for himself--bathing, eating, defecating, urinating, copulating

--and that obscenity consists of violating that privacy.6 5

The element of obscenity consists in one's being "too close" to other persons performing intimate physical acts. If Clor is correct, then verbal obscenities ought to be suitable in intimacy although unsuitable in public. This is the logical extension of his reasoning, though he does not so extend it.

Philosophically, Clor pleaded a case for "setting apart" the special functions of the body and reserving them for intimacy.

It should therefore follow that terms symbolizing these private functions are also "set apart" and acceptable when uttered privately or in intimacy, just as religious verbal symbols are acceptable when uttered within the framework of religion.

If copulating is "special" and "private," then the use of the word fucking should also be "special" and proper between two people in privacy. This, however, does not seem to be the attitude of users of the English language who consider the absence of fuck and other obscenities in their linguistic performance a mark of gentility and civilization. Farb drew a parallel with the Nupe people of West Africa who also consider their polite vocabulary a mark of refinement: 59

The Nupe make a very sharp distinction between terms that are acceptable in polite speech situations and those that are not. Indelicate subject matter must be expressed by a circumlocutionby a word borrowed from another language, or by a technical term reserved for use solely by the scholarly class. Nupe lacks any native word for sexual intercourse; instead, its speakers use a word of Arabic derivation that means "to connect." Nor do words exist in the native vocabularly for "defecate," "menstruation," or "semen." Should the need arise to express these things, Arabic technical terms or very involved euphemisms are used. An obscene word for "vagina," dzuko, does exist, but it is rarely used; speakers attempt to avoid expressing the thought altogether, but when it is necessary to do so they employ a borrowed word, kafa, that means simply "opening." Respect for what they consider standards of good taste is a conscious process among the Nupe. An- thropologists who have studied this tribe report that the Nupe are intensely interested in language and they spend much time talking about its fascinating aspects. When they employ euphemisni manipulate words to eliminate tasteless connotations, or borrow terms from other languages, they are as fully aware of what they are doing as is any genteel lady from one of the Western cultures.96

If it seems foolish to differentiate between dzuko and kafa

in referring to the vagina, why do English speakers differ-

entiate between penis and prick, between vagina and cunt,

between sexual intercourse and fuck, between bowel movement

and shit? Why has the state of Kansas gone so far as to pass

a legal stricture against the use of obscenity by faculty members on university property?6 7

Historical Handling of Verbal Taboo The clandestine areas of profanity and obscenity have

historically been handled by resorting to scientific terminology or by creating euphemisms. In the area of profanity,

one hears such euphemisms as gosh darn for goddamn, heck for hell, and jimniny crickets for Jesus Christ. Among the many 60 euphemisms created as substitutes for obscenities are shoot for shit, pee for piss, s.o.b. for' soi-of-a-bitch, and make for fuck. The habit of creating euphemisms dates back at least to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, as Farb substantiated:

At that time the community began to make a distinction between a genteel and an obscene vocabulary, between the Latinate words of the upper class and the lusty Anglo-Saxon of the lower. That is why a duchess per- spired and expectorated and menstruated--while a kitchen maid sweated and sat and bld. TheTinguistic gulf between Norman-derived and native Anglo-Saxon words remains as wide as ever after nine hundred years. . . And whenever the speech community must discuss anything it deems unpleasant, the discussion is acceptable on the condition that it is carried on in the elegant vocabulary bestowed on English by the Normans.6 8

A great deal has been written about euphemisms, and as

British author Peter Fryer said, "Of the making of euphemisms there is indeed no end.'"6 9 Eric Partridge in his well-known

Dictionary of Slang wrote, "90 percent of the world's obscene terms and locutions are the result of euphemism: neither the frank nor the mealy-mouthed realize that to call, e.g., the genitals by the one name and to eschew all others would soon lead to a lack of both obscene and euphemistic words and perhaps even minimize both euphemism and obscenity.,,7 0 The interesting thing about euphemism is that it is self-defeating, as Fryer indicated:

Once a euphemism becomes accepted and its primary meaning changes to the shameful thing for which it has come to stand, the taboo, if it be strong enough, tends to be transferred. The gooseflesh reappears. And some fresh, innocent, victim-word has to be sacri- ficed on the altar of propriety.7 1

The euphemism itself becomes taboo and no longer serves its purpose. 61

The high point of euphemism in the history of the English

language was probably 1833 when Noah Webster, the famous lexi-

cographer, issued an expurgated edition of the Bible in which

he cut out the "many words and phrases which cannot now be

uttered, especially in promiscuous company, without violence 7 2 to decency." Among many other substitutions, Webster re-

placed teat with breast, in the bel with in embryo, stink

with smell, to give suck with to nurse, fornication with

lewdness, and whore with lewd woman.7 3 He even cut out whole

verses "as beyond the reach of effective bowdlerization "74

and offered the following justification: "Many words and phrases are so offensive, especially to females, as to create

a reluctance in young persons to attend Bible classes and

schools, in which they are required to read passages which cannot 7 5 be repeated without a blush." Small wonder that in his dictionaries of 1806, 1807, 1817, 1828, and 1841, clandestine terms were auspiciously absent. Webster established an on-going tradition in lexicography that persisted for over a hundred years. How he harmonized his actions with the following statement he made in 1817 is difficult to see: "The business of the lexicographer is to collect, arrange and define, as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language, and leave the author to select from them, at his pleasure, and according to his own taste and judgement." 7 6 Yet, even the third and most recent edition of Webster's New International Dictionary in 1962 omitted fuck on what 62

they deemed were practical, rather than lexical, grounds. Since their investment totaled three and a half million dollars, they opted not to imperil the whole enterprise by insisting on "that 7 7 word.?? It was not until the 197O's that some dictionaries--among them the new Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language--acknowledged the obvious fact that the word fuck is known by every native speaker of English. Encouraged by lexicographers and academicians, strict taboos persisted tenaciously in American speech up through the first world war. In the thirties the Hollywood list of banned words, which might never be spoken in any motion picture, included cocotte, courtesan, eunuch, harlot, madam (for "brothel-keeper"), slut, tart, trollop, wench, whore, son-of-a-bitch, sex, and sexual. The words virtuous and bum were to be avoided, and the expression traveling salesman might not be used "where reference is made to a farmer's daughter.,78 During and after World War II, a loosening of verbal taboos began which has continued gradually up to the present time. The 1970's are presently witnessing a revolutionary change in taboo usage which only future generations will be in a position to evaluate with historical precision. However, this does not preclude the right of individuals to formulate their own judgments for their own self-interest as members of contemporary society. 63

How Taboos Are_ Furthered or Broken Verbal taboos are furthered when speakers of the language (1) agree to abstain from using the taboo word, or (2) use the taboo word in situations of great emotional involvement, in violation but in recognition of the taboo. In the first instance, when one refrains from using a stigmatized word, one is actively perpetuating the taboo, making a non-verbal statement of acceptance of the taboo. In the second instance, when one uses a taboo word in anger, hostility, in an ostentatious display for effect, he is also actively abetting the taboo. Read explained this phenomenon:

The use of a taboo word does not necessarily signify the breaking of the taboo. The utterance of such a word in order to feel the thrill of doing the forbidden, to insult someone, or to express the jangled state of one's nerves is the observance of taboo, although in a manner contrary to the normal. This may be called "inverted taboo." . . . Inverted taboo has its origin in primitive practices. The sexual and excretory areas are thought to have magical significance, and thus the use of certain forbidden words for insult and opprobrium is a verbal extension of phallic symbolism. Among primitive peoples obscene words are on occasion made use of for their magical value in achieving some purpose, especially the bringing of rain.79 Taboos are only broken when banned words are used non- emotionally and casually. Read felt, "The only way that a taboo can be actually broken is to use the word unemotionally in its 8 0 simple literal sense." I agree that using the word unemotionally is a requisite for its transformation from taboo to non-taboo, but I disagree that it must be used in its "simple literal sense" for it to escape the onus of disgrace. 64

A word can effect this cleansing rebirth by being used symbolically and literally, but it can also be used non-symbolically, and in the latter case the mere inundation of unemotional usage weakens the taboo. D.H. Lawrence's attempt to influence verbal taboo was via the first technique of applying obscene terms symbolically, literally, and non-emotionally. In Lady

Chatterley's Lover, he said fuck for "sexual intercourse,"

shit for "excretion," and s for "urination" consistently throughout the book. Arguing his case at the Lady Chatterl Lover trial, Richard Hoggart said: "We have no word in English . . . which is not either a long abstraction or an evasive euphemism, and we are constantly running away from it, or dissolving into dots, at a passage like that. He wanted us to say 'This is what one does. In a simple, or-

dinary way, one fucks', with no sniggering or dirt."81 Lawrence waged war against the clandestine terms of obscenity, not profanity. His usage of profane words was usually in the form of inverted taboo. But his campaign to transfer obscene words from taboo to acceptance was conducted via strategies advocated by Read. There is no need for a term to be taboo when it represents an act that is not taboo, Lawrence reasoned. On the other hand, the celebrated musical "Hair," popular in the 1960's, also purposed to eliminate certain verbal taboos but attempted to do so by the technique of repetition, inundation, overexposure to the sound formations so that they no longer had shock value for listeners. Distinguishing between 65

symbolic and non-symbolic usage was not important because these strategists believed that the mere repetition of the sound formation would eventually render the term acceptable. Which method, if either, one advocates depends upon one's personal appraisal of verbal taboo. Since language is viable and dynamic, it turns out to be, after all, a question of who is to be master, as Humpty Dumpty said.

Contemporary Taboo Words In his 1972 master's thesis on sexual and excretory vernacular, Steve Lodle explained that there is currently a debate over which is the most taboo and obscene word in the English language.82 Several authorities, including Read,8 3 Stone,8 4 and 8 5 Montague, imply that the word fuck is the most distasteful to English speakers. Sagarin no- minated cocksucker.86 Other researchers believe motherfucker is the most offensive; this word may, however, be one peculi- arly for those living in poverty. Lodle said, "Fears of violating incest prohibitions may be especially predominant due to close proximity in crowded quarters which may force bed-sharing between mother and son. There also may be an unstable home environment, characterized by continually changing father figures which give the growing boy only the mother to identify with." The term motherfucker conjures up multiple threats: (1) your mother is the object of your sexual attention, and (2) your mother is a prostitute, and (3) you are to blame. Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver 66

commented that motherfucker was "a very functional term in the black community, because the family structure of black people in this country has been, like, tampered with, and has always been tampered with until somehow the women end up, like, the center of the family. So that they call matriarchy, right? By using the term motherfucker, man, you're doing the worst thing that a human 8 8 being can do." So, the "most" taboo word in contemporary English may vary depending on the geo- graphical location, racial composition, or economic status of the group being researched.

In 1973, Foote and Woodward asked forty college students at the University of Wyoming to produce all the words which were obscene to them. Foote and Woodward used obscene to include all categories of verbal taboo and did not differentiate between profanity, obscenity, nor animal abuse. Tabulation of Foote and Woodward's research yielded the following information:8 9 Word Frequency ofAppearance fuck 33 shit 33 bastard 25 cunt 23 motherfucker 20 cocksucker son-of-a-bitch 19 19 bitch 18 God Damn prick 15 15 damn 12 whore 10 hell asshole 10 cock 10 piss 9 tit(s) 9 9 suck bullshit 8 8 nigger 8 67

Foote and Woodward's list was a measurement of attitude--the terms deemed obscene by the largest number of participants in the study. On the other hand, Cameron's study in 1969 was concerned not with subject evaluation of taboo terms, but with subject usage of terms--linguistic performance. His researchers observed and recorded actual speech of college students at leisure, adults at work, and adults at leisure. Subjects were unaware that they were being observed. All words spoken were recorded, and all were tabulated according to frequency of utterance. As might be expected, pronouns (I, yu, me, she, he, it) and articles (the, a) appeared at the top of the list. The surprise came when Cameron's study included the taboo terms damn, hell, Jesus, fuck, shit, bastard, and God in the top fifty words. No previous studies of word frequency count9 0 had included clandestine terms anywhere near the top of the list. In extracting only the recorded taboo terms, Cameron found the following ranked frequency of utterance:91 College Students Adults-on-the-Job Adults at Leisure (48 W912T rs 3wow (16,d C1,5T Words collected) collected) collected) damn 404 damn 212 damn hell 31 378 fuck 127 motherfucker Jesus 26 321 shit 120 shit fuck 311 26 hell 47 Christ 25 shit 266 bastard 19 bastard fuck 18 234 ass 12 Jesus God 218 17 blow 11 God 15 bitch 189 fucking 5 son-of-a-bitch bull 176 14 God-damn 2 asshole 8 Cameron's college sample was gathered by forty-seven Stout State students who were instructed to carry out their normal activities 68

over a week's time while surreptitiously recording the speech they overheard. The large number of researchers assured that no one person's life style pattern would unduly influence results. Safeguards in recording were also built into the procedures; listeners were to record the first three words they heard during the conversation at fifteen second intervals as determined by the sweep second hand on their watches. Lis- teners were to sample speech in as many varied locations as possible and were to choose the moment of first sampling before entering into the vicinity where recording would take place. This methodology should have resulted in a random sampling of speech on that college campus. Sampling employed in the Adults at Work part of the project was not so random. It was limited to employee-employee conversation out of hearing range of customers and supervisors and is therefore not representative of total on-the-job dialogue. Furthermore, the places of sampling were two factories, three eating estab- lishments, seven retail stores, and a clinic. Nooffice workers, bankers, lawyers, or engineers were included. The sample ignored the clerical and professional fields which comprise large segments of our society. Sampling was done by twenty- two Wayne State University students, two-thirds of whom were male, using their own part-time jobs as study arenas. The Adults at Leisure collection of words was the smallest of the samples. It was drawn in Detroit by seven Wayne State Univer- sity students who listened to shoppers, telephone conversations 69

of their parents, and conversation at a party and at a pool hall. Thenumberof researchers is less than in the other two areas surveyed, and the sampling may well be limited by the narrowness of the sources explored. Sources appear to be connected with the researchers' personal lives, which may have resulted in their hearing what they wanted to hear. At any rate, the consistency with which damn heads each list

makes this finding appear reliable and valid. Other findings

should be interpreted within the limitations of the research project and may not be legitimately generalized to the entire population. Numerous segments of the population are not pro-

portionately represented, among them older, retired people,

professional, highly educated people, and highly religious

people. Cameron apparently embarked on his study in an ef-

fort to refute the validity of previous research on word-

frequency counts. Referring to earlier studies, Cameron

stated, "It seems highly probable that these . . . word samples

were gathered in such pristine situations and/or in such a

biased manner that they couldn't possibly represent typical

U.S. speech patterns; hence this study." 92 In exposing the "pristine" methodology of earlier studies, Cameron performed a valuable service. However, I question his research as well.

His study does not have representational validity for the entire population but instead represents the speech of certain members of the population under certain conditions. Careful reading of Cameron's published findings indicates that he was 70

aware of the limitations involved. "Our sample is as yet too small for the parameters to have normative weight," he said in reference to the Adults at Work statistics.93 However, despite Cameron's careful wording, the inference one draws from his article is that his research is more representative of general American speech than were earlier studies. Cameron's study is valuable and presents information that needs to be acknowledged, but a truly representational study of general American speech, particularly with respect to our clandestine vernacular, has yet to be produced. Nonetheless, the findings of both Foote and Woodward and Cameron were valuable for com-

parison when analyzing the taboo words used most frequently in the three films studied in this thesis.

Foote and Woodward were concerned with identifying clandestine words by an appraisal of attitude. Cameron was interested in the frequency with which taboo words were used in everyday speech. This thesis focuses on the purpose of taboo terms,

what the words are intended to accomplish. The five functions

of language which Ogden and Richards enumerate in The Meaning

of Meaning are the theoretical framework for this analysis.9 4 However, to effect the best examination of taboo words, I have arranged the functions of speech differently and justify the rearrangement with the authors' own statement when discussing their four emotive or non-symbolic functions: "Each of these non-symbolic functions may employ words either in a symbolic capacity, to attain the required end through the references 71

produced in the listener, or in a non-symbolic capacity when

the end is gained through the direct effects of the words.''9 5

The following questions are asked in this investigation:

1) What is the definition and the etymology of the word? 2) How does this taboo word appear to function in the context in which it is used? a) Does the word function symbolically? 1) Is it an expression of attitude toward the listener? a) Positive attitude b) Negative attitude 2) Is it an expression of attitude toward the referent? a) Positive attitude b) Negative attitude 3) Is the word used to promote intended effects? a) Positive effects b) Negative effects b) Does the word function non-symbolically? 1) Is it an expression of attitude toward the listener? a) Positive attitude b) Negative attitude 2) Is it an expression of attitude toward the referent? a) Positive attitude b) Negative attitude 3) Is the word used to promote intended effects? a) Positive effects b) Negative effects c) Intrapersonal effects 3) How does the speaker seem to feel about the referent from observable data other than the spoken taboo word? a) Life style as a criterion of empirical judgment b) Other dialogue as a criterion of empirical judgment c) Interpersonal relationships as a criterion of empirical judgment 4) Is the speaker's verbal encoding of taboo words in accordance with his observable attitude toward the referent?

The first question is asked as a beginning point of reference and in order to provide a denotative framework against which 72 the other questions apply. Considerable emphasis in the thesis is placed on the second question. The third and fourth questions are carefully considered throughout the thesis and provide the framework for concluding remarks in Chapter VI. NOTES

B Daniel Fogarty, Roots for a New Rhetoric Bureau (New York: of Publications , Te ace r s~Co~Teg 1959), p. 1. e, Columbia Univ., 2C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning (New York: Harcourt, of Meaning Brace and Company, 1923)T, intro. 3 Fogarty, p. 2.

4 Fogarty, p. 3.

5S.I. Hayakawa, ed., Language, Meaning (New and Maturit York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), p. 19. 60tto Jespersen, Language, Its Nature, Development and 2rgin(1921; rpt. New York: W.w.~Norton & Company, Inc.,

7 Jespersen, p. 27.

8 Jespersen, p. 27. 9Edward Sagarin, The Anatomy of Dirty Words (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1962), pp.~27-28. 1 0James Frazer, The Golden Bou.g: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd ed. (1890; rpt. Lnon: Macmillai7 1955),~p. 190. 1 1S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Action (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1939, 194)PP. n-39. 1 2 Hayakawa, Language in Action, p. 39. 1 3 1.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric London: Oxford (New York, University Press, 9)7Tpp. 4-5. 1 4 Hayakawa, Language in Action, p. 39. 15 Jean Piaget, The Child's Conception of the World (New York: Harcourt, Brace Co., l929) pp. 8T~82. 1 6 Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Mass.: Addison- Wesley, 1954), p. 187.r 1 7 Richards, p. 3.

73 74

18 Fogarty, p. 134. 19 Ogden and Richards, p. 8; Richards, pp. 29-31. 2 0 Richards, p. 30.

2 1 0gden and Richards, p. 9. 2 2 0gden and Richards, p. 11. 2 3 0gden and Richards, pp. 9-10. 2 4 0gden and Richards, p. 23. 2 5 0gden and Richards, p. 9.

2 6 0gden and Richards, p. 9. 2 7 0gden and Richards, pp. 10-12. 2 8 0gden and Richards, p. 12. 29 Ogden and Richards, p. 10. 3 0 0gden and Richards, pp. 239-241. 31 Ogden and Richards, p. 230. 32 Ogden and Richards, pp. 223-225; Richards, pp. 40-41; Fogarty, p. 34.

3 3 0gden and Richards, p. 234. 3 4 Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity (Connecticut: ternational In- Non-AristotelianE ibFy Publishing Co., 1933), pp. xlviii-xlix.

3 5 Korzybski, pp. lxviii-1xix. 3 6Hayakawa, Languae, Meaning and Maturity, p. 16. 37 Hayakawa, Language, Meaning and Maturity, p. 5. 38 See Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality, and

Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and York: Technology Reality (New Press of M.I.T. and7JohnWiT7, 959). 3 9 Hayakawa, Language in Action, p. 145, pp. 27H28. ge, Meaning and Maturity, pp. 11-12 and 75

4 1Korzybski, pp. 34-35.

42 Hayakawa, Langiage. Meani and Maturity, p. 29. 4 3 Fogarty, p. 104. 44 Anatol Rapoport, "What is Semantics?" in Language, Meaning and Maturity, ed. SI. Hayakawa (New York: Harper 4 Brothers, T1954)p. 13.

4 5.1 1. . Hayakawa, Language in Action, pp. 74-75. 4 6 Hayakawa, Langage in Action, p. 84. 4 7 Hayakawa, Language in Action, p. 77. 4 8Mary G. McEdwards, "Agitative Rhetoric: Its Nature and Effect," in The Rhetoric of Our Times, ed. J. Jeffery Auer (New York: AppleTon-Fentury-CFrf, T~6~), p. 7.

4 9 McEdwards, pp. 10-11. 5 0 Peter Farb, Word Pla What Happens When People Talk (New York: AlfredTA.KnopT, 174), p. 78. 5 1 Russell Foote and Jack Woodward, "A Preliminary Investi- gation of Obscene Language," Journal of Psychology, 83 (March 1973), 264.

5 2 Sagarin, pp. 26-27.

5 3 Frazer, p. 190.

5 4Frazer, p. 190.

5 5 Sagarin, p. 28. 5 6 Jespersen, Language, Its Nature, Development and Origin, p. 139. 57 Allen Walker Read, "An Obscenity Symbol," American Speech, 9 (1934), 266-267.

5 8 Read, p. 266.

59 Read, pp. 264,265.

60 Foote and Woodward, p. 264. 6 1Farb, pp. 76-77. 6 2 Harry M. Clor, Obscenity and Public Morality ;Censorship in a Liberal Society (Chcago: ~~ii university of icago Press 67),pp. 210-226 76

63 Clor, p. 210.

6 4Clor, p. 225.

6 5 Clor, p. 225.

6 6Farb, pp. 79-80.

67 Farb, p. 86.

68 Farb, p. 80. 69 Peter Fryer, Mrs. Grundy: Studies in English Prudery (London: Dobson Bo-oksT 1963), p.T. 70 Fryer, p. 79.

7 1Fryer, p. 30,

72 Read, p. 273.

73 Fryer, p. 28; Read, p. 273.

7 4Fryer, p. 28.

75 Fryer, p. 258.

7 6Read, p. 274.

7 7Fryer, p. 279.

78 Fryer, p. 28; Steve E. Lodle, "Sexual and Excretory Vernacular: A Delineative Examination and Empirical Analysis Scope, of the Nature and Function of Taboo, Inhibitory, Euphemistic, and Dsyphemistic Communication Paradigms," unpub. master's thesis (California State College, Long Beach, 1972), p. 181. 7 9 Read, pp. 274-275.

80 Read, p. 275.

81 Fryer, p. 285. 8 2Lodle, p. 124.

8 3 Read, p. 264. 8 4 Leo Stone, "On the Principal Obscene Word of the English Language," The International Journal of Psychoanalys'is, 35 (1954), 435-482. 77

8 5Ashley Montague, The Anat y of Swea ( MacMillan Company, 19677 ~~~: 8 6 Sagarin, p. 110,

8 7 Lodle, p. 125. 88Lodle, p. 126. 89 Foote and Woodward, p. 269. 9 0for example: E. Thorndike and I. Lorge, The Teachers 30,000 Work Book of Words (New York: Columbia~U iv., Teachers College Press, 1944).

K. Berger, "Conversational English of University Stu- dents," Speech Monographs, 34 (July 1968), 65-73. 91Paul Cameron, "Frequency and Kinds of Words in Various Social Settings, or What the Hell's Going On?" Pacific Socio- logical Review, (Fall 1969), 103. 92Cameron, p. 101. 93Cameron, p. 103. 9 4See Chapter I, p. 22. 95 Ogden and Richards, p. 226. CHAPTER III

SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF FILMS

Throughout I.A. Richards' writing, he urged his readers

to pursue "a persistent, systematic, detailed inquiry into 1 how words work." He felt this inquiry should be philosophic, "that it must take charge of the criticism of its own assumptions. . . . How words mean, is not a question to which we can safely accept an answer either as an inheritance from common sense . . or . as something vouched for by another science . . since other sciences use words themselves and not least de- lusively when they address themselves to these questions. "2

A detailed inquiry into the way taboo words work is the purpose of the next three chapters. The movies examined, Jaws, Shampoo, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, were all viewed multiple times. In order to procure data for study, the sound track of each film was recorded on a cas- sette tape recorder. From tape recordings, all of the possible taboo language was extracted and transcribed. A compilation of the most frequent terms spoken in all three movies revealed the following ranked order:

Frequency of Utterance Je sus (Chr is t) -Tr fuck 35 shit 33 God (goddamn) 24 hell 22 ass 21 son-of-a-bitch 10 damn 8

78 79

Sometimes these words appear in varying forms (fuck/fucking)

and in varying combinations '(Jesus/Jesus Chri'st, God/goddamn), and it became apparent early in this study that a decision was needed regarding a method of classification. One way to

group terms would have been by word similarity. This method was used by Paul Cameron in his study, though his distinctions did not extend to pronunciation differences (fucking/fuckin').3 However, because there were so many different formations of some of the terms (fuck/fucking/fuckinl/fucker/motherfucker,

Jesus/Jesus Christ/Christ/Lord/Jesus H. Christ/Christ Almighty), it seemed that categories based on exact word duplication would be too narrow toallowuseful analysis. Therefore, a decision was made to group terms together according to subject rather than according to sound formation. For example, all of the vocalizations that referred to the person of Jesus are included under one heading.

At the outset, one of the criteria established in selecting the terms to study was that of commonality. I had hoped to examine terms used in all three movies. Despite the fact that one movie is rated "PG" and the other two are rated "R," it turns out that a great deal of commonality does exist. Jesus, shit, God, hell, and ass occur in all three movies. Fuck is not heard in Jaws, and neither damn nor son-of-a-bitch appears in Shampoo. Because fuck is used so frequently in Shampoo and Cuckoo and because it has been the chief English taboo for at least three centuries, it was retained in the list of terms 80

for specific investigation. 'Damn and son of-a-bitch were omitted, since they are not spoken in all three movies.

After analysis of individual words was begun, it became apparent that two more words should be eliminated in order to stay within reasonable limitations in length for a master's thesis. Preliminary examination revealed that shit and hell are used with less variety than the remaining four words, and it was therefore decided to study in depth the two profane words, Jesus and God_, and the two obscene words, fuck and ass.

Film--Jaws

Most known for its moments of suspense and terrifying surprise, Jaws is an old-fashioned adventure film of man against beast. Several persons on a small New England resort island fall victim to the attack of a white shark, and three men embark on a seahunt to find and kill the shark. The movie is an updated Moby Dick, minus Melville's symbolism and metaphoric levels of meaning. Taboo terms used most frequently in the film are:

Frequency of Utterance

Jesus (Christ) 10 hell 7 God (goddamn) 6 damn 6 son-of-a-bitch 5 ass 4 bastard 2 crap 2 shit 1 These are spoken primarily by the three main characters, Quint the sea captain (fifteen taboo utterances), Brody 81

the police chief (ten taboo utterances), and Hooper the oceanologist (nine taboo utterances). In addition to the terms listed above, the phrase "screw around" is used once by Hooper. Quint addresses Hooper as "Supercock" once, and also once ad- monishes him, "Stop playing with yourself, Hooper," as Hooper is engaged in a card game of solitaire on the deck of the boat. Several preliminary observations can be made about the clandestine language in Jaws. The most obvious is that profanity is used more than obscenity. Since Jaws is "PG" and the other two films are "R," this distinction is signficant: profanity is evidently more palatable to the American public than obscenity.

One oblique lesson from Jaws is that ladies don't swear. Brody's wife, Ellen, is admittedly not one of the three central characters. Nonetheless, she is on the scene probably as much as Larry, the town mayor. Yet Larry utters four taboo words, while Ellen is permitted one "God" in response to a picture of a mutilated shark victim. Not only do ladies not swear, but ladies protest against too much swearing as evidenced by Ellen's disdain of Quint, the most prolific swearer in the film. Men, on the other hand, do swear, one concludes after watching Jaws, particularly sea captains. In fact, young boys growing into manhood swear, as viewers learn when they see a short scene of Brody's son at play with his friends. "Damn!" the boy says as he tries to launch his new boat. One of the marks of masculinity and adult manhood in Jaws 82

is the use of clandestine vernacular. There is not one major character in the film who does not use taboo words. The way in which these words function and the purposes for which they are used in Jaws will be examined in following chapters.

Film- Shampoo

Shampoo is alternately characterized as the autobiography of Warren Beatty, a film of superb political satire, or the movie with "that thirteen-letter word!" Though far from what should be its legitimate claim to fame, Shampoo's word-of-mouth publicity has often been due to its open pronunciation of the word cocksucker and the phrase suck his cock. In my judgment, Shampoo should be viewed on two levels. On one level it is political satire aimed at the Nixon administration and all that it represented after the Watergate scandal, and at the uncaring, uninformed American public. Political overtones are present throughout the story, which begins on election eve, carries through election day, and ends the following morning. Irony and satire are evident when the camera zooms in on Nixon saying over television, "This administration will be an open administration." Agnew proclaims, "We intend to put an end to the permissive attitudes which have characterized our society in recent years." On another level, Shampoo is a "very funny and very scared look at the kind of good life a lot of Americans would live if given half a chance." This was Vincent Canby's description.4 The central actions of the film are the sexual adventures of 83

a male hairdresser in Beverly Hills, California. Entanglements between and among several partners who play musical beds provide a plot which is more farcical than serious, though philosophical overtones appear toward the end. Canby felt, "The

glib, tough, desperate style of the film is a mirror-reflection of the lives it looks at.,,5 A cast of five comprise the main characters: George--the hairdresser, Jill--his present girlfriend, Jackie--his ex-

girlfriend, Lester--the big businessman and current boyfriend of Jackie, and Felicia--Lester's wife and George's frequent sexual partner.

Taboo words spoken most frequently are:

Frequency of Utterance Jesus (Christ) 18 shit 14 fuck 10 ass 9 hell 8 God (goddamn) 7

Regarding equal appropriateness of swearing for men and women, Shampoo sends a message similar to Jaws, but less imbalanced. The above words are pronounced by men in forty- seven instances and by women in twenty-one instances. Although George is definitely the main character in this film, women on screen are not lacking, and nearly equal opportunity exists for taboo expression by both sexes. Therefore, one must conclude that the preponderence of taboo words from men rather than women is a reflection of cultural attitudes; swearing is still more palatable as a masculine than a feminine trait. 84

George utters the largest number of clandestine terms

(twenty-five), followed by Lester (seventeen), Jackie (eight),

Felicia (five), and Jill (four). It is interesting to note that Jill, who uses the least swear words, is portrayed in

the film as having the most "redeeming" qualities of any of the main characters. She is the one who shows a degree of maturity in her actions and solicits both sympathy and approval from the audience.

Inaddition to the words listed above, the film also includes pe_, son-of-a-bitch, bitch, screwing, fairy, ay_ queer, faggot, tit, pissed-off, and whore. The expressions making it and get my gun off are voiced, and one character communicates very clearly through the nonverbal sign of the upraised middle finger. As already mentioned, the most novel and "shocking" word in Shampoo is cocksucker, spoken twice by Jackie. When asked what she would like to do more than anything else in the world, Jackie replies in drunken stupor, "I'd like to suck his cock," and points to George. As dinner guests mirror their astonishment and horror, Jackie insists, "Come on, who's the best little cocksucker in the whole world?" and slips to her knees in front of George, apparently to demonstrate. Verbal and nonverbal activity are here combined for heightened shock effect. The verbal symbols are intended for more than communication of intent; they are intended to produce an emotional reaction in the listener.

Because the story-line in Shampoo is about sexual activity, it is not surprising to find that many of the taboo words 85

spoken in the film are sexual in nature or inference: fuck, ass, cocksucker, screwing, fairy, ja, queer, faggot, ti, whore, making it, and gt'my gun off.

Film--'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest If Jaws is adventure and Shampoo is political satire, then Cuckoo might be classed as social commentary. The film makes a strong and very obvious statement about the misguided rehabilitative efforts of mental institutions and perhaps of all social institutions whose proclaimed aim is human welfare. The story of Cuckoo is simple--the mental hospital succeeds in turning a sane man into an insane man; the message of indictment is devastating. Probably because of the "heaviness" in purpose, the filmmakers built into Cuckoo a great deal of comic relief, much appreciated and needed by the audience. Only one main character exists in Cuckoo. He is McMurphy, the non-conforming, but totally sane, hell-raiser sent to the mental hospital because of his lack of submission on the penal work farm. Also significant in the plot is Nurse Ratched, the authority figure in charge of the hospital ward. The Indian who has successfully faked being deaf and dumb is symbolically important. Taboo language abounds in this film, perhaps appropriately since the characters are judged abnormal and are segregated from society. However, it is interesting to note that the words used are the same words used by sane characters in the other two movies. In this and the next two chapters, the 86

purpose for which the words are used will be examined with

the intent of discerning whether any functional difference

is apparent in the way taboo terms are employed by rational

people and the way they are employed by those judged irrational.

Clandestine terms spoken most frequently in Cuckoo are:

Frequency of Utterance fuck 25 shit 18 Jesus (Christ) 13 God (goddamn) 11 ass 8 hell 7 son-of-a-bitch 5 damn 2

After hearing Nurse Ratched's name with its rather obvious rhyme plays on hatchet and wretched, one might expect a certain level of language awareness and sophistication in Cuckoo, and while the most frequent terms are the familiar ones above, there is indeed variety and innovativeness in the less frequent taboo terminology. For instance, McMurphy refers to "banging beaver," calls Nurse Ratched "something of a cunt," and har- rangues an inmate named Harding, calling him "Hard On."

Jerking-off is said three times. Crap, bitch, and butt appear, and one patient predicts that McMurphy will be successful in the hospital because "he'll just show Nurse Ratched his big thing." A guard warns McMurphy that by the time he gets out of the hospital he'll be "too old to get it up." The intent of the filmmaker in slipping in such terminology may be didactic, to gradually condition the audience to greater 87

tolerance of verbal taboo. No filmmaker would have considered using cunt ten or fifteen years ago, because as lexicographer Eric Partridge explained, "F**k shares with c**t two distinctions: they are the only two SE /Standard Englishf words excluded from all general and etymological dictionaries since C18 and the only two SE words that, outside of medical and other official or semi-official reports and learned papers, still cannot be printed in full anywhere within the British Commonwealth 6 of Nations." All of these infrequently heard terms are used in humorous ways in Cuckoo, humor being employed to better insure acceptance by the listener.

The taboo language in Cuckoo is used primarily by McMurphy and secondarily by the other inmates. Nurse Ratched never pronounces a taboo term, nor do the other hospital administrators. The guards, on the other hand, swear freely, using fuck, shit, and hell.

Sexual activity plays only a small part in the overt action of this film, yet many of the taboo terms spoken are sexual in reference. Such usage could be attributed to the fact that the speakers, judged abnormal by society, use language inappropriately--in ways not connected with experiences at hand. This conclusion is not warranted since I have just indicated that the guards, judged normal by society, also swear freely, using the same words as the inmates. McMurphy swears freely, and we know he is not really insane. A second possible hypothesis might be that sex is a subject which 88

permeates human thinking to such a degree that it spills out in language at the slightest provocation, whether realizeable in actuality or not. One might even conjecture that sex is on the minds of the patients precisely because they have been

isolated and deprived of sexual activity and therefore sub-

stitute speaking about it for acting it out. However, if this

is so, it is done subconsciously rather than consciously be-

cause the words themselves are used non-symbolically without

sexual reference. Therefore, the significance of the frequency

of sexual terminology in Cuckoo seems to be the degree to

which language has become separated from reality. This hy-

pothesis will be tested when obscenity is discussed in Chapter V.

A combined chart of the taboo terms heard in Jaws,

Shampoo, and Cuckoo shows frequency of usage and divides the words into the two categories of profanity and obscenity:

Jaws Shampoo Cuckoo

Profanity Jesus (Christ) 10 18 13 God (goddamn) 6 7 11 hell 7 8 7 damn 6 0 2 Profanity Total 29 33 T3

Obscenity 0 10 25 shit 1 14 18 ass 4 9 8 son-of-a-bitch 5 0 5 Obscenity Total 10 ~3-5

TOTALS 39 66 89

The next two chapters are devoted to examination of four individual terms- Jesus, God, fuck, and ass. The etymology 89 of each word is presented, and the way in which the word functions is explored. The detailed etymology of each taboo term is an aid to analyzing its current meaning. In attempting to ascertain what a word means to the speaker using it, it seems reasonable to begin by investigating the early origins of the word, its developmental history, and the popular meaning(s) it has had in the past. This at least is a starting point, a backdrop against which present usage can be compared and contrasted. Notes II.A. Richards, The Philosphy ofRhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 230 2 Richards, p. 23. 3 Paul Cameron, "Frequency and Kinds of Words in Various Social Settings, or What the Hell's Going On?" Pacific Socio- logical Review, (Fall 1969), 103. 4Vincent Canby, "Ten Top Films," New York Times, December 28, 1975, Sec. D., p. 1, p. 17.

5 Canby, p. 17.

6 Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Et mological Dictionar of Modern English, 2nd ed. (New Y'ork:Mac i1an, 59),p.239.

90 CHAPTER IV

SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF PROFANE WORDS Specified words in American English, God, Jesus, hell, and damn, have been historically reserved for religious use only. The speaking of these terms apart from an ecclesias-

tical framework constitutes profanity. To profane something

is to render it unholy, to refuse to observe its sacredness.

As explained in Chapter II, profane words are not banned from the language entirely. They are not taboo in sound formation, but only taboo when used improperly, apart from a religious context.

American society is fundamentally an outgrowth of its

European heritage, and the words sacred in our culture are in line with Western tradition where communities have ba- sically organized about Christian values.1 The taboo with the lengthiest history comes from one of the Ten Commandments,

"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain"

(Exodus 20:7). This is very possibly the first verbal ban recorded. Whether or not it is still in effect today is a question this chapter seeks to answer by examining the way the term functions in Jaws, Shampoo, and Cuckoo. Lodle, in his master's thesis, said, "After all these centuries of preserving the sanctity and hallowedness of God's name, this commandment may be in jeopardy, not because of an uprise of scornful

91 92

desecration, but because no one cares about cherishing divine- ness." On the other hand, state highway bureaus avoid using the prefixes GOD and DAM for automobile license plates, indicating a continuing observance of the taboos of profanity in this country.3 The two terms examined in depth in this chapter are Jesus and God.

Profanity--Jesus The word Jesus derives through Medieval Latin Jesus, Late Latin Iesus, Greek Iesous, and is from late Hebrew or

Aramaic Jesua which replaced the earlier Yhosua or Joshua. The meaning of Joshua in Hebrew was "salvation."1 4

In the Old Testament, a major Hebrew figure was Joshua; the major figure of the New Testament had the same name but was known by the Greek form of it, Iesous (in English, Jesus). Christian theology holds that Joshua was the forerunner of Jesus. Joshua's physical salvation of the Israelites fore- shadowed the spiritual salvation which came through Jesus. The name Jesus was not used in Old English; instead, the designation was Haeland, Savior. During the Middle

English period, Jesus was used regularly in its Old French

(objective) form Iesu or Jesu. It was, however, not usually written in full but was abbreviated in the forms ihu, ihs, ihc, and ihu. Of these, IHS is probably the best known abbreviation, finding its way into jewelry, engravings and plaques. The Latin nominative form Iesus or Jesus was rare in Middle English but became the regular English form in the seventeenth century. 93

In order for the term Jesus to acquire taboo status when

used profanely, the person of Jesus and his new religion of

Christianity had first to acquire positive status and wide-

spread acceptance. As Christianity grew in number of followers

and in sociological prominence, the name of its founder became

more and more revered until finally it was reserved exclu-

sively, by English speakers, for ecclesiastical purposes.

"Word magic'" is still promoted today by religious groups

who sing songs about Jesus entitled, "His Name is Wonderful," "Jesus is the Sweetest Name I Know," "There's Something About

that Name," and "Take the Name of Jesus With You." Is the

name of Jesus wonderful or is the person of Jesus wonderful?

Perhaps the former is a clearly understood substitution for

the latter. However, the obscenity and consequent police

violence which occurred at the 1968 Democratic Convention

would indicate that confusion between symbol and reality is

still rampant and probably exists with Jesus as well as with other emotive terms.

Often coupled with the proper name Jesus are the words

Lord or Christ, Christ meaning "saviour" or "messiah" in

Hebrew. Today Lord Jesus is usually used religiously, but

Jesus Christ is often uttered as an oath. American English also abounds with euphemisms for Jesus, created over the centuries of its taboo status: Jimminy Crickets, jeepers, jee-whiz, gee-whiz, jeez, gee.

Jesus, used singly and in combination with 'Christ, was the most frequent taboo term in the three movies being studied.

Its frequency is shown below: 94

Jaws Sh'mpoo Cuckoo

10 18 13

In Richards' terminology, the literal referent of this word

is the person of Jesus, the founder of the Christian reli-

gion. If the term Jesus is used symbolically, it will be to point or direct the listener to the person of Jesus. Ap-

plying this distinction of symbolic and non-symbolic usage,

I conclude that in these three contemporary films, Jesus is

used symbolically once and non-symbolically forty times.

The sole example where a speaker seems to speak reli-

giously occurs late in Shampoo when the black female worker

in the hairdresser shop informs George that Norman's son has

been killed in an accident. She says to George, "Lord have mercy," and though she does not speak with particular reverence, it is an example of referential or symbolic usage. However, it is open to debate, of course, whether the sound formation

Lord should be classified with terms referring to the person

of Jesus or with terms referring to the deity God, or by

itself. Lord can refer to either God or Jesus, and my arbitrary decision was to include this usage under Jesus.

Based on a study of contextual usage, it appears that at least thirty of the forty non-symbolic utterances of Jesus and Christ are said with emotion, usually negative emotion. This conclusion is based on paralinguistic phenomena associated with pronouncing the word, such as loudness of tone, intensity, and pitch of voice. It is 95

also based on observing the behavior which accompanied the

verbalization. Though cataloguing is always arbitrary and

imprecise, I feel the emotional pronunciations of Jesus can be grouped under three headings: those expressing real anger and hostility, those expressing mild annoyance and frustration, and those expressing what linguist Allen Walker Read called "the jangled state of one's nerves." 5

There are nine times that Jesus is used in real anger

and hostility. In seven instances, the anger is directed

toward an audience; the linguistic symbol both expresses

the speaker's opinion of the receiver of the message and

communicates that opinion to the receiver. "Jesus!" says

Jackie to her boyfriend, Lester, when he interrogates her

about her social life. Lester is obviously jealous and feeling uncertain of his place in Jackie's affections.

Jackie is resentful of the tight control he has over her life and angry that she cannot see friends socially without being questioned by him. "Jesus!" she says to him in genuine anger; the word substitutes for saying, "I am really mad at you!" and the intent is understood by both parties.

Lester expresses his hostility toward George by saying, "Jesus Christ! You live like a pig!" He has forced his way into George's apartment and is appalled by the meagerness and the messiness of what he sees, sus- pecting, no doubt, that this is the very place where both 96

his wife and his girlfriend have happily bedded down with George. Lester's anger, expressed partially by the use of "Jesus Christ!" is directed more toward the person of George than toward the state of his abode. However, mixed emotion is evident. There is disgust with the ugliness of poverty, jealousy of George's way with women, frustration that life has no simple answers. In the same scene, Lester says, "Jesus Christ! What a way to live! I never lived this way- not even when I was your age." Overriding his various emotions is a strong feeling of anger. In Jaws, Brody is extremely angry when he says to the mayor, "Leaving the beaches open is like ringing the dinnerbell, for Christ's sake!" He and Hooper are attempting to convince Larry, the mayor, that the shark is truly dangerous and that the beaches must be closed for the safety of the islanders and tourists. Larry, on the other hand, is angry at them because closing the beaches would eliminate much revenue from vacationers, and he replies, "For Christ's sake! Tomorrow's the Fourth of July." McMurphy says "Jesus Christ!" when he is very angry and upset during a card game. The game is blackjack, and McMurphy is dealer. Martini, a truly irrational patient, keeps repeating the words, "Hit me, hit me," and obviously does not conform to game rules. In addition, the music on the ward is turned to a very high volume which makes it necessary for the card players to shout in order to be heard. 97

Martini's verbal pestering, the loud music, and the behavior of the other inmates all combine to produce a mounting anger in McMurphy, who finally jumps up from the table saying, "Jesus Christ! Are you nuts gonna play cards or fucking jerk-off?"

The last instance of Jesus being used to express an angry attitude toward the receiver, occurs in Shampoo when Lester says, "Jesus Christ!" after hearing the price of something over the telephone. He considers the price exorbitant, a fact adequately communicated to his listener by the words Jesus Christ and the angry tone of his voice. After hanging up the telephone, Lester says, "The son-of-a- bitch calls that wholesale!" The remaining two times that Jesus accompanies the expression of deep anger are when that anger is either self- directed or directed diffusely at the world in general. At his election-night party, Lester is in a state of great agitation, worried about his girlfriend's behavior, his wife's reaction to the presence of his girlfriend, his girlfriend's reaction to her former boyfriend, and so on. Evidencing his distraction, he pours a drink for a guest and neglects to stop, continuing to pour the liquid all over the guest's hand and the counter top. The guest says, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" and Lester's reply is, "Jesus Christ!" said in anger at himself for his own stupidity. 98

George, on the other hand, is angry with the whole world when he says, "Christ!" toward the end of Shampoo. He has just returned home to his apartment, discouraged that Jill has broken off their relationship. Now he finds that Lester has forced his way into the apartment and is accompanied by two bodyguards who evidently plan to beat him up. In such a context, it might seem reasonable that any taboo expression of anger would be directed toward the persons involved. But such is not the case. George says, "Christ!" in utter defeat and to express hostility toward the whole world. There are fifteen examples in these three films where Jesus is spoken in mild annoyance or frustration. This grouping is differentiated from the previous one only by degree of intensity. The taboo symbols function in the same way, but the scene is less volatile. The category of annoyance stands mid-way between anger and casualness on a continuumof emotional intensity evidenced by the speaker when uttering the words. In twelve instances, the annoyance is directed toward another person; the linguistic usage is emotive and serves the purpose of describing and communicating the attitude of the speaker toward his audience. This is true several times in Shampoo. Early in the movie, George applies for a loan at a local bank. He has high hopes of setting up his own beauty parlor and thus getting out from under the pressure his employer exerts on him. It is soon obvious that the 99

banker is not going to give him the money, and George indi-

cates his unhappiness. In turn, the banker shows his annoy-

ance at George's lack of social politeness and says, "Jesus. Let me show you something."

A Hollywood agent has just listened to Jill's explana-

tion that she may or may not be interested in accepting his

offer of work which would take her out of the country. Her

hesitancy is due to a romantic interest in George. If she could marry George, she would certainly not be interested

in leaving the country. However, marrying him is not a

certainty. The agent had presumed that Jill would be

thrilled by the opportunity he presented, and after her confusing ambiguity, he turns to a fellow agent and says in exasperation, "Jesus. This town!"

Later in the film, Jackie invites Jill to attend

Lester's election-night party. When both women appear at the party, along with their escorts, Lester calls

Jackie aside and questions why she extended an invitation to Jill. Jackie expresses her annoyance at Lester by saying, "Jesus. She's my best friend!"

In Jaws, Quint twice expresses annoyance with the words, "Jesus H. Christ!" He looks at Hooper's shark cage as it is being loaded on the boat and says, "Jesus

H. Christ!" in amazement and annoyance. A moment later he repeats the same term and goes on to complain that "nowadays kids take out everything when they go to sea." 100

In the "good old days," it was just a man himself against the elements and the beast he was pursuing.

Numerous examples of Jesus used in mild annoyance and

frustration are found in Cuckoo, usually voiced by McMurphy.

McMurphy says, "Jesus Christ!" whenhe is exasperated at the

inmates on the fishing boat. Several seem reluctant to bait

their hooks with small fish from the bait tank, and McMurphy

says, "Jesus Christ. They're dead!" He is frustrated but

is also trying to encourage the men to begin fishing. "Jesus

Christ!" he says in another scene when one of the patients cannot understand the rules of basketball.

McMurphy learns in group therapy that, although he has

no control over his own tenure at the hospital, many of the

other patients do and are there voluntarily. McMurphy is

frustrated and uses Jesus profanely several times. "Jesus

Christ," he says to the circle attending group therapy,

"You're no crazier than the average asshole walking around

on the street!" He is both annoyed and puzzled by their

voluntary commitment to the hospital. "For Christ's sake,"

he says, "Are you crazy or something?" He is referring to

the insanity of their willing commitment, not to their mental states. In desperation, he turns to one of the most dependent patients on the ward and says, "Billy, for

Christ's sake, you must be committed!" He cannot believe that the inmates whose functioning ability is much less adequate than his own are voluntary wards of the hospital 101

while he is there involuntarily. There is frustration and annoyance expressed toward the inmates, toward Nurse Ratched and toward the societal system that holds him captive. Jesus is a linguistic way of expressing these feelings. It is used by Harding, one of the patients, to impart his annoyance to McMurphy, who has arrived on the ward full of cockiness and life. Harding, though intellectually bril- liant, is depressed and defeated by life. He resents McMurphy leadership and tries to harangue him. When McMurphy has a snappy comeback to his every remark, Harding says in frustration, "Jesus!" McMurphy is himself frustrated a short while later when he learns that he may not be able to watch the world series baseball game on television. When Nurse Ratched agrees to let the men vote on the issue, McMurphy is elated. He is certain the inmates will elect to watch the game. However, when many decline to raise their hands, he realizes for the first time the degree of fear and dependency they have. To obtain a majority, McMurphy begins to solicit votes from the less rational patients on the ward. There is no response from these inmates, and in exasperation, McMurphy says, "For Christ's sake, isn't there one of you fucking maniacs that knows what I'm talking about?" Hos- tility is not the tone of his question so much as is frustration. In fact, the difficult decision was whether this should be included as a casual pronunciation or an emotional 102

one. In attempting to capture the proper attitude accompanying each taboo word expressed, I ended up classifying this adjectival use of fuck as casual. All of the examples just discussed have been cases where annoyance and frustration were directed toward the audience being addressed by the speaker. The varying forms of Jesus describe the attitude of the speaker toward another person but also are used for an intended effect, the effect of communicating that attitude directly to the receiver. An interpersonal situation exists.

In three other instances, the words fulfill the purpose of simply "letting off steam." The intended effect is an intrapersonal one of allowing the speaker to feel more com- fortable because annoyance has been ventilated rather than kept inside to smolder. Of course, the theraputic effects that accompany ventilation also take place when anger or annoyance is expressed directly to the object of that anger or annoyance. "Letting off steam" is one of the several purposes intended in such cases. In the three instances about to be discussed, it seems to be the primary and only function of the word.

At the very beginning of Shampoo, a phone call interrupts George and Felicia's love-making. After talking to the caller, Jill, George decides he must leave. It is still dark in the room; he stumbles over furniture and says, "Jesus Christ!" in annoyance. 103

In the middle of Cuckoo, a water hose gets sprayed on numerous patients, one of whom responds with, "Oh, Jesus!" to show he is upset. Once McMurphy says, "Billy, for Christ's sake, what's the matter?" This usage is particularly difficult to catalogue. It occurs at the height of the party McMurphy has staged. By bribing a guard with liquor and the promise of sexual relations, McMurphy manages to smuggle into the hospital two girls and a large quantity of liquor. A wild celebration is in progress, but McMurphy decides it is time for him and the Indian to escape, as he has previously planned. Suddenly, as he says goodby, he notices the utter dismay on Billy's face. His question, "Billy, for Christ's sake, what's the matter?" is voiced in both compassion and annoyance. He is now ready to leave, and further delays are unwelcome. Nonetheless, he responds to the raw hurt on Billy's face and cannot turn his back on him. His solution is to ask one of the girls to have sexual intercourse with Billy, after which he intends to proceed with his escape, knowing he has done Billy a service. "Billy, for Christ's sake, what's the matter?" is said with a measure of annoyance, but the annoyance is directed at the circumstances of delay rather than at Billy as a person. Even though the question is voiced directly to another person, the purpose of the profanity seems to be to "let off steam" rather than to express an attitude toward an audience. 104

In addition to expressing the emotions of extreme anger and of mild annoyance, a third category exists, consisting of times when Jesus is spoken with considerable feeling even though the feeling cannot be classified on an anger continuum. The emotion is sometimes fear, sometimes relief, sometimes awe, but all in all, it seems to express what Read called, "the jangled state of one's nerves." 6 Some experience has been encountered which has reached the feeling level of the person, and part of his response is linguistic-- the vocalization of some form of Jesus in a profane way. Jaws opens with a shark attack on a girl swimming at night in the ocean. The following day, the remains of her body are finally found by an assistant who summons Chief Brody to the scene. As Brody views the mutilated limbs, he says, "0, Jesus!" with great feeling. Obviously, he is badly shaken.

Relief is another strong emotion, and inresponse to it, Brody says, "Thank Christ!" at one point in Jaws. Brody, Hooper and Quint have been in Quint's boat hunting the shark for some time. The boat is in bad shape, having suffered damage from the shark. Quint has destroyed the radio and shows maniacal intent to capture the shark, regardless of the danger to himself, Brody, Hooper or the boat. When the craft changes direction and Brody realizes Quint has finally changed his mind and is heading toward shore, he says, "Thank Christ!" with profound intensity. 105

The same words could conceivably be uttered by a religious person and represent symbolic usage. There is nothing in Brody's life-style nor other conversation to indicate he has religious beliefs. However, there is nothing, either, to indicate he has not accepted the norms and values of the culture, part of which are acknowledgement of the Christian tradition. After all, we are a nation which prints, "In God We Trust" on our coins and includes the name of God when pledging allegiance to our flag. It is not surprising that religious concepts would become subconsciously implanted in our citizens. Perhaps such subconscious concepts emerge in life or death situations and one says, "Thank Christ!" in mixed usage, consciously aware of the emotive function but subconsciously demonstrating the referential function. Fear is one of the emotions accompaying the use of Jesus. In Jaws, the second attack of the shark occurs near the beach in waters crowded with fun-loving bathers. When blood appears in the water, screaming begins, whis- tles blow, and Chief Brody orders everyone out of the water. As the crowd stumbles and shoves and crawls to shore, the expression "Jesus Christ!" is heard. The tone is one of great fear. When George and Jackie are discovered having sexual intercourse on the floor of the garden house, George says, "Jesus! What'll I do?" The emotion is pure panic. Jackie is also voicing fear when she says to her 106

companion as she enters Lester's election-night party, "For Christ's sake, don't let me drink too much!" Obviously, past experience has taught her that this is a real possibility and apparently leads to unpleasant consequences. An unusual use of profanity occurs in Cuckoo when McMurphy says, "Jesus Christ!" in a tone which seems to combine awe, delight and discovery. He has just learned that the Indian, whom he believed to be deaf and dumb, is actually neither. McMurphy is astounded. He chuckles and slaps his thigh and thinks the Indian has been exceedingly clever to pull the wool over the eyes of the hospital administrators. He says, "Jesus Christ!" as a way of expressing his astonishment and pleasure in what he has just learned. Thirty non-symbolic, emotional utterances of Jesus have been presented and classified according to whether they express deep anger, mild annoyance, or some other affective feeling. All of these examples meet Read's definition of inverted taboo: "The utterance of such a word in order to feel the thrill of doing the forbidden, to insult someone, or to express the jangled state of one's nerves." 7 "Such usage is the observance of taboo," said Read, "although in a manner contrary to the normal. This may be called 'inverted taboo."'8 Read was careful to explain that the use of a forbidden word does not necessarily signify the breaking of the taboo. Hostile usage indicates, instead, that the term is still viewed as a taboo. The power of the curse 107

comes only via an acceptance of the taboo. If the taboo is not strong, no power is unleashed in breaking it. A word can be an oath only if the power of its literal symbolic meaning is originally acknowledged, either consciously or subconsciously. In these three films, the acknowledgement seems to be at a subconscious level. The characters in the films do not give evidence in their other verbalizations nor in their life styles of conscious identification with Christian religion nor its founder. When Jackie enters the party and says, "For Christ's sake, don't let me drink too much!," there is no evidence that she means, "For the sake of Jesus, the founder of Christianity, don't let me drink too much." It is conceivable that this same phrasing could be employed symbolically if someone were to say, "For Christ's sake, we want to help you. Let us share some of our belonging with you. Come in out of the cold." Because a teaching of Jesus was to help the poor and needy, his followers still advocate such behavior in his memory, and thus, this would be symbolic usage. Such is not the case when Chief Brody tells the mayor that opening the beaches on the Fourth of July will be "like ringing the dinnerbell, for Christ's sake!" Nor is it the case when McMurphy says, "Billy, for Christ's sake, you must be committed here and not voluntary!" The closest to a symbolic reference might be Jackie's statement, but if so, it is at a deep subconscious rather than conscious level, and this is true with all the emotionally-laden pro- nunciationsof Jesus in these three films. 108

A lesser number of uses of Jesus, ten of them, might be classified as casual rather than emotional. They bear investigation since casual usage would signal that the strength of the taboo is rapidly diminishing.

When Chief Brody realizes Hooper is the oceanologist for whom he has sent, he says, "0 for Christ's sake!" and shakes hands with him, laughing. The situation has been tense before, but this is a moment of comic relief. Brody has been ordering

Hooper around, having mistaken him for a tourist because of his appearance. He suddenly realizes that Hooper is the oceanologist and that he now has some moral support in his campaign against the shark. This brings relief, and "10 for

Christ's sake!" is said in a tone of comaraderie. The phrase is not totally void of feeling, but it is much less emotional and volatile than other uses throughout the films. A positive rather than a negative attitude toward the receiver is indicated.

Another instance of casual, but positive, employment of Jesus is George's statement to Jill, "Jesus--I don't know; you're great!" George, falling into his natural, normal pattern of flattering women, tells Jill she is

"great." Jill then wants to hear more precisely why she is great, and George responds with the sentence quoted above. His attitude toward the receiver is favorable; the effect of his message, embellished by Jesus, is positive.

The remaining eight examples of casual usage of Jesus can only be described as space fillers. This is the way 109

they function, as mere space fillers and not as meaningful units of communication. Several times, vocalization of Jesus appears to take up time while the person on the screen is contemplating, digesting some piece of information he has just learned, or struggling to convey adequately his own message to another person. This seems to be the case toward the end of Shampoo when George uses the term twice. He has been discovered having sexual intercourse with his former girlfriend, Jackie. This has led his current girlfriend, Jill, to suspect he may have been unfaithful to her numerous times during their relationship. When George arrives at Jill's apartment to apologize, Jill challenges him and wants to know about his activities when he is apart from her. George confesses the frequency of his sexual exploits, and in trying to explain the reason for such Don Juan behavior, he says in bewilderment, "Jesus, I don't know." He repeats this sentence again, not so much in anger as in perplexity. He is trying to figure out his own behavior and having a difficult time making it correspond to society's attitudes, which seem as foreign to him as his behavior does to society. Jesus is said casually, as a space filler. He can think of nothing else to say. He makes the same reply earlier in the film to Jill, under similar circumstances. Jill is exasperated with him because she believes he is behaving in subserviant fashion in his attempt to "win friends and influence people" in 110

order to obtain funds for his own beauty parlor. Jill stamps her foot and tells him, "Stop kissing everyone's ass. . . It just makes you a kiss-ass. Grow up, grow up." George's response to Jill's display of temper is, "Jesus" said while shaking his head in confusion and bewilderment. McMurphy, in Cuckoo, also reacts with some bewilderment when he learns that he is an involuntary patient in the hospital but that many of the others are voluntary. While discussing this in group therapy, he uses several taboo terms to express his annoyance and frustration, and these have been previously itemized and discussed. However, he also says, "For Christ's sake," once in a casual way, as though he were pronouncing those words, or perhaps any words, in order to buy time, to stall long enough to fully comprehend what he has just learned. The phrase functions as a space filler. This also seems to be the purpose of McMurphy's "Jesus" as he wakes up on the floor of the ward the morning after the party. A quick glance and he realizes he has not escaped, as he had planned; furthermore, the hospital room is in shambles. "Jesus" he says as the scene begins to sink in. A moment later and he might have said "Jesus" in panic, since it is apparent that trouble will soon erupt with the arrival of the morning hospital administrators. But at the instant of awakening, McMurphy seems to say "Jesus" in bewilderment and confusion, as a way of filling time until more meaningful thoughts can be gathered and verbalized. 111

Quint, the most prolific swearer in Jaws, says many taboo words with many different degrees of intensity. At least twice he uses Jesus in a casual way. "Jesus," he

says once while walking around his boat. No identifiable emotion seems to accompany the vocalization. Previous to this, just before the boat leaves the dock, he says "Christ Almighty"in much the same monotone. There is nothing the viewer learns about his inner feelings from the way in which he speaks these words, and certainly they are not used symbolically. They seem totally separated from their literal referent, and more than anything else, they fulfill man's compulsive need to talk. I found it difficult to classify the last example of casual use of Jesus, which occurs at the very beginning of Shampoo. Felicia says, "Oh Christ--get me another Kleenex.?? She is in George's apartment, in bed with him, and the phone has just rung, interrupting their time together. It seems reasonable that she might have voiced this sentence in anger or at least annoyance. However, vocal tone, intensity, and pitch of voice all are casual rather than hostile. I.A. Richards reminded his readers that nearly all speech is a mixture of strictly symbolic meaning and of various levels of emotive meaning. "Most writing or speech then . . . will take its form as the result of com- promise," Richards said. "Only occasionally will a symbolization be available which, without loss of its symbolic 112

accuracy, is also suitable (to the author's attitude to his public), appropriate (to his referent), judicious (likely to produce the desiredeffects) and personal (indicative of the stability or instability of his references). The odds are very strongly against there being many symbols able to do so much."?9 With this in mind, it is not surprising that various utterances from Jaws, Shampoo, and Cuckoo do not fall into neat categories.

Casual uses of Jesus, such as the ten examples just discussed, are the strongest indication that the term is in a state of transition and no longer carries the stigma it once did. Read said, "The only way that a taboo can be actually broken is to use the word unemotionally in its simple literal sense." I cannot accept Read's position that this is the only way a taboo can be broken, although I agree that it is one of the ways. When the referent becomes separated from the symbol to the degree that it has in these ten examples of casual pronunciation of Jesus, I believe this also constitutes a way in which taboos diminish and disappear. Such casual usage meets Read's requirement of unemotionality, and this, I believe after examination, is the key to the demise of verbal taboos. Obviously the stigma against the profane use of Jesus is much less powerful than it used to be. This is proven by the mere fact that vocalization of the word is permitted in all three films and that one of them is still rated "PG." 113

However, the dominance of inverted taboo over casual usage signifies that Jesus, consciously or subconsciously, still carries emotional meaning for most American people and is still part of our clandestine vernacular.

Profanity--God

God is often coupled with damn in the films studied, and while it is used almost extensively in a non-symbolic way, the degree of intensity and repugnancy varies a great deal. Though each movie contains mixed usage, God functions predominantly in Jaws as an exclamation of intensity, in Shampoo as an expression of hostility, and in Cuckoo as a casual adjective. Our contemporary word, God, is descended from Old English and is akin to Old Frisian and Old Saxon god, Old High German got, German jtt, Old Norse godh, and Gothic guth. The original formation is of uncertain origin, but Germanic cog- nates point to Sanskrit hu meaning "the one invoked" or huta meaning "he calls upon (a god)." The most common dictionary definition of the word is, "The Supreme Being, the Deity." When lower case is used, however, jod may refer to any of several deities or be used to identify any deified person or object.

There exist in English many terms derived from God and many euphemisms, most of which are not connected consciously with their source in the minds of speakers of the language. Some of the go-terms are straight-forward 114

such as goddess, godhead, godfather, and godmother. The good- terms are easily discernible such as goodbye, good day, good night, and good evening. Other derivatives like gid, giddy, gospel and gosip, are much less obvious. Gid, a disease affecting sheep, takes it name from giddy since a notable symp- tom is the sick animal's tendency to run about in circles until it falls. Giddy here means "silly" or "mad" and derives from Old English gydig which meant literally "mad" or "possessed by a god.

The many euphemisms which have developed for God are

generally classified as those (1) in which g and d are retained, as gad, gawd, jed, gud; (2) in which g is retained, but the rest of the word is modified, as garigog, g24LY, goI, gosh; (3) in which g is replaced by c, as cock, cod, or by d, as dod; (4) in which the initial consonant is dropped, as od, ud; (5) in which a preposition is prefixed, as begad, bear, bedad, igad; (6) containing the possessive s, usually with other peculiarities, as ads, ods, gads, gars, 4l; (7) in which the possessive is reduced to s, as 'sblood, 'sbodikins, 'sdeath, 'slid, swounds, or zounds; (8) in which God is reduced to d, as drat. A few of these as cock and jgg_, are of lateMiddle English vintage, but most are of various dates from the eighteenth century forward.11 The large number of derivative words and euphemisms testify to the important place God has occupied in our language. Words like goo'dby, od day, and good night tell of earlier religious influence and awareness, since 115

they are contractions of the original God-be-with-you, God-

give-you-a-good-day, and God-give-you-a-good-night. Appar-

ently, God, in its symbolic, religious sense, used to be a

more frequent part of everyday speech. Certainly the count-

less euphemisms have arisen because the taboo against

profaning the name of God has been so strong through the

years. As with Jesus, this taboo may now be weakening. All

three films being studied used God numerous times without

recourse to euphemisms. In fact, of the twenty-four times

that God is vocalized, only once is it definite that God

the Deity is the intended referent. Of the remaining,

twenty-three utterances, twenty-one seem definitely non-

symbolic, one is a strange mixture, and the last one seems

emotive on the surface but may be subconsciously symbolic.

In Cuckoo, one of the patients in the hospital mentions

God the Deity during a group therapy session. Harding, an

emotionally unbalanced intellectual, is questioned by Nurse

Ratched about his sexual relationships with his wife. In

trying to answer her question, he cannot be either direct

or concise, but talks ambiguously in higher and higher ab-

stractions. One of the other inmates suddenly says in hostile tones, "Aw, knock off the bullshit, Harding." This

immediately triggers Harding's sensitivity, and he argues back that he is not talking about bullshit, but about all of the important realities of life--relationships, content, form, "I'm talking about God, the devil, hell and heaven," 116

he says. "Can't you understand that?" To which the hostile inmate replies, "You're so fucking dumb, Harding, I can't believe it," and the intensity of the entire group begins to escalate as other patients take sides and join in the verbal fracus. Richards advises that a speaker's attitude toward his audience and/or toward the referent is often revealed by the environmental context in which a word is used and by paralinguistic phenomena accompanying the utterance.12 In this case, very little of Harding's attitude toward the referent is revealed. Instead, Harding expresses his attitude toward his audience and toward the haranguing in process. In the sentence quoted, Harding clearly intends his referent to be the Deity.

Harding's God is the only clear case of symbolic-and thus non-taboo--use of the word in the three films. The utterance that seems next closest to being symbolic comes from George in Shampoo. In proposing marriage to Jackie at the end of the film, George says, "I swear to God I'll make you happy." Studying George's statement in writing and out of context, one might infer that the speaker ad- heres to a religious philosophy and that his deity is powerful and authoritative, someone capable of punishment should George's promise be broken. Such inferences are probably inaccurate in the context of the film. On the surface it seems more true to George's personality to 117

paraphrase his statement, "I promise I'll make you happy." However, the fact is that he chose to say, "I swear to God" rather than "I promise," and one wonders if such linguistic choices reveal more about our inner depths than we care to show to others or than we ourselves know. Sapir's statement

was that language "is the carrier of an infinitely nuanced expressiveness." 1 3 Is God used non-symbolically here with absolutely no reference to a deity, or is this word choice indicative of the speaker's confused philosophy of life? Does he mean "I swear to myself," "I swear to you," or "I swear to God"? Or does George know himself well enough to recognize what he means? The context of the film and the character of George lead me to believe that the phrase is

indicative of a cultural belief system which lies beneath the level of George's awareness and which he might or might not deny in conscious confrontation. George has been indoc-

trinated into American culture, and he has heard reference to a single deity called God. He has absorbed at some level of consciousness the fact that Presidents are sworn into office by taking an oath before this deity and that witnesses in courts of law invoke the same God to verify the truthfulness of their testimony. He says, "I swear to God I'll make you happy" because he has heard over the years that this is proper phrasing for someone expressing solemn intent or dedication. I do not believe there is a conscious connection in George's mind between the symbol God and the 118

literal referent of God the Deity. There is no evidence in George's behavior that he has a personal interest in a deity. On the other hand, there is no evidence that he does not. The absence of evidence one way or the other, says that if George has religious beliefs, they exist in an unknown compartment of his thinking and are not the reference for his statement to Jackie when he proposes. God is vocalized repeatedly early in Jaws by the nude girl swimming at night when she is attacked by the shark. Her screams are filled with terror and anguish. The repetition of "Oh God!" seems like exclamation, the use of any strong word to express heightened fear and physical pain.

Obviously, the word serves that function which Richards called "emotive" and Hayakawa, "presymbolic." "The making

of noises with the vocal organs is a muscular acitivity,"

Hayakawa reminded us. "Many of our speeches--especially exclamations-are . . . . involuntary," just as many muscular activities are involuntary. "Our responses to powerful stimuli are a complex of muscular and physiological activities: the contraction of fighting muscles, the increase of blood pressure, the tearing of hair, and so on, and the making of noises, such as growls and snarls." 1 4 Hayakawa went on to explain that because human beings consider it beneath their dignity to express strong emotion in purely animalistic noises, they do not ordinarily growl like dogs, but substitute words instead. While words are 119

necessary for emotional release of tension, it still seems significant to ask which ones are chosen to fulfill this function and why those particular words rather than others. The girl in Jaws is responding at a physiological level to extreme pain. She also probably recognizes at a thinking level that death is imminent. In the face of this reality, is her scream to some deity for help, or is it an involuntary "growl word"? It is impossible to know with certainty, but I believe it is both, that the repetition of God contains a multiplicity of meaning; there is symbolic meaning, probably at a subconscious level, and there is purely emotive meaning.

The remaining twenty-one pronunciations of God in these films fall more clearly into the category of non-symbolic. Any intent for the symbol God to point to the Deity as referent would be very remote and very unconscious in these instances. Within this category of non-symbolic, however, God is used in several different ways. It functions in an exclamatory way by itself and as a noun modifier. It is used both casually and emotionally, both negatively and positively.

In most of the cases of emotional usage, inverted taboo is demonstrated. Fourteen vocalizations of God substantiate that it is still a clandestine word with enough power to fulfill the need of a speaker in search of insult and/or tension release. Ten times God is an emotional interjection. 120

In five of these instances, fear is the identifiable feeling; in four more examples hostility toward another person is expressed; and once hostility is inwardly directed by the speaker to himself.

A good illustration of God being spoken in panic occurs in Shampoo. After not seeing each other for some time, former lovers George and Jackie are reintroduced by Lester, Jackie's present boyfriend. George offers to style Jackie's hair for the party that evening and drives to her apartment to do this. The beautification project leads to amorous inclinations on the part of both, and they are in the preliminary stages of sexual intercourse on the floor of Jackie's bathroom when suddenly Lester's voice is heard in the outer regions of the apartment. "My God! It's Lester" Jackie says in great agitation. This is one of three times in the films that God is prefaced by the possessive pronoun my. Such coupling of words must stem originally from symbolic reference when one indicated his allegiance to monotheism and the Hebrew God by such terminology. The book of Ruth in the Bible contains the familiar pledge Ruth makes to Naomi, "Whither thou goest, I will go. . . . Thy God shall be my God . ." Christian songs include phrases like "0 Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds they hands have made. . . ."My God was originally a method of identification, of aligning oneself with the Deity. Such is not the purpose of Jackie's pronouncement in Shampoo. Though 121

fear is very evident, there is no indication that she calls on her personal deity for help. Instead, the word and the referent are totally disconnected, at least on a conscious level. Richards said that exclamations and oaths normally "have only to satisfy the condition of appropriateness. . . The only contexts required here would seem to be of the simplest order possible in psychology, as simple as the tooth- ache-groan context."5 This seems to describe the functioning of "My God!" as Jackie says it in this instance in Shampoo. In Jaws, "My God!" is heard from someone in the beach crowd as bathers desert the water and scramble to shore after the second shark attack. It is an interjection filled with terror. Cheswick, one of the patients in Cuckoo, says, "Oh my God!" in response to a statement made in group therapy. On the surface, Cheswick seems angry at Nurse Ratched, but fear is present also. This example perhaps fits in two categories. Nurse Ratched has been pressing a shy inmate to discuss his feelings about women. When the inmate does disclose that he once proposed to a girl, Nurse Ratched brings up the intimidating subject of his mother and a reminder of the suicide he attempted following rejection of his proposal. "Oh my God!" is suddenly heard from Cheswick on the other side of the group therapy circle. "I'd like to ask you a question," Cheswick says. "Why are you pressing Billy if he doesn't want to talk about 122

this right now? Why don't we just go on to other business?" Nurse Ratched answers his question with a cold, "Mr. Cheswick, the business of this meeting is therapy." Cheswick's exclamation, "Oh my God!" is said with a great deal of emotion. I believe compassion for Billy is involved and also a great deal of fear, fear for Billy and fear for himself. What will Billy do if Nurse Ratched pushes him much further? What will he do himself is she should turn those tactics on him? This is a very frightening thought to Cheswick, and foreshadows what is to come in the movie.

All three vocalizations of "my God" are exclamatory and not informationally communicative. They are self-serving, intrapersonal in the sense of fulfilling the speaker's need to release tension. Brody says, "Good God!" in a similar way as he looks out the window of his home and sees his son sitting in the water in his new boat. Having just come from viewing the mangled remains of the first shark victim, Brody is terrified and over-reacts when he sees his son near the water. He quickly orders him out of the boat; when his wife protests his harshness, he shows her a picture of a shark victim in a book, and she says, "God!" in great horror. Thus there are five instances in these films when God serves the speaker as a linguistic way of expressing and releasing fear, always as an interjection and always separated from the referent, at least consciously.

God serves Lester as an interjection when he needs a way to express dissatisfaction with himself. Near the end 123 of Shampoo, Lester forces his way into George's apartment and, judging by the appearance of his strong-arm companions, seems intent on inflicting physical harm on George in revenge for George's recent sexual intercourse with Jackie. In the process of confronting George, Lester airs verbally a lot of his own frustrations with himself and with life in general.

Among other things he says, "I don't know what the hell I was living for," "You can lose it all, no matter who you are," "Shit! I don't know," "I don't know why I care about

Jackie anyway; she's nothing but a whore," and "What the hell."

In the context of this introspection, in both hostility and depression, he says, "Goddamn it!" and though the pronoun it functions grammatically as the object of the verb, it is really Lester himself who is the recipient of the hostility.

The significance of the statement is Lester's disgust with himself and his ineffective style of life.

In another group of examples, God accompanies the expression of hostility toward an audience listening to the speaker. An obvious instance of this occurs in Shampoo when

Feclicia turns to her husband and says, "God, Lester, you're miserable!" Her tone and facial expressions convey pure hatred. She does not mean, "Oh, you poor dear, you're feeling miserable." Instead, she is pronouncing judgment.

The setting is Lester's fancy election-night party at the

Bistro. Felicia has just met Lester's girlfriend, Jackie, and has immediately discerned the relationship. She wants 124

to discuss it with Lester as they sit down to dinner. Lester tries to postpone a confrontation until after the party, indicating that it is inappropriate to concentrate on themselves and their domestic problems in the midst of such a gathering. Not only is it socially inappropriate, Lester thinks, but it is self-centered in view of the political nature of the evening and the patriotic rhetoric which the guest speaker is expounding. Indicating his wealthy and politically-minded guests, Lester says, "These people are concerned with more than themselves. Some of us are trying to make this country a better place to live." Such altruism is so antithetical to his personal treatment of her that at this point Felicia replies, "God, Lester, you're miserable!" Her anger is directed at both Lester's infidelity and at his hypocrisy. Hooper is angry at Quint when he says, "Goddamn it!" toward the end of Jaws. The shark hunt has been in progress for some time, but the men have been unsuccessful. With each encounter of failure to kill the shark, Quint becomes more and more intense and fanatical. His behavior becomes bizarre, and he destroys the ship-to-shore radio so that neither Hooper nor Brody can communicate with persons at home. In this maniacal mood, Quint begins to drive the boat at full speed. It is obvious that the boat is old and cannot stand the strain of such abuse. Brody and Hooper are irate, frightened, and helpless to do anything. When the engine begins to blow up, Hooper utters the words, "Goddamn it!" in frustration and hostility. 125

Earlier in the voyage, Hooper has used the same terminology to express irritation at Brody. Negative emotion is

conveyed, but it is annoyance rather than true hostility. The shark has just appeared at the bow of the boat, rising up out of the water in one of the most dramatic scenes in the film. His tremendous size is verified for the first time, and both of the viewers, Brody and Hooper, are stunned. Hooper immediately races to the cabin in great excitation. Ironically, and almost comically, he returns with his camera. Enthusiastically, he focuses and then decides he needs Brody in the foreground to give the picture depth. Brody automa- tically responds to his request to move to the front of the boat deck, but is reluctant to get as close to the edge of the boat as Hooper wants him to. In the middle of this rather ludicrous scene, Hooper says, "Goddamn it, Martin, get in the picture!" McMurphy is angry with Martini, a patient who cannot learn the rules of basketball and will not follow his in- structions. McMurphy sets up team strategy, and Martini ruins it every time the ball is thrown to him. Martini is irrational and properly belongs in the mental hospital; McMurphy is totally frustrated by the communication void. McMurphy has a vested ego interest in the basketball game since he has talked the guards into playing on the opposing team, attempting to stir up some competition and lively interest in the midst of the deadly hospital environment. 126

Because he wants to win, McMurphy is angry when Martini throws the ball away, and he says, "Goddamn it! I told you not to do that!"

In the same basketball game, McMurphy uses God two more times, but in the form of an adjective. He says to Martini in a furious tone, "You threw the goddamn ball into the fence!" He also blames physical surroundings for his displeasure at the playing skills of his team. IThis goddamn court!" he says, referring to the concrete on which they are playing. The emotion of the speaker is still negative; only the grammatical form of God has changed so that it now functions as a modifier. Lester, in Shmoo, is fond of using God in this fashion and talks about the "goddamn fish" for which he is being charged an exorbitant price. He wants fish on the menu for his election-night party, but indicates his allegiance to the almightydollar by his fury at the high cost. He later blames the political woes of the country on that "goddamn Lyndon Johnson."

In all of the non-symbolic, emotive examples discussed

to this point, God has accompanied negative expression. Whether as an exclamation or as anadjective, whether self- directed or audience-directed, the emotional tone has been either hostility or frustration. All of these instances constitute inverted taboo, according to Read,16 and indicate that God is still a clandestine term with sufficient 127

"word magic" to serve as an oath for speakers of American English.

On the other hand, I found one clear cut example of

Go being used emotionally to convey positive feeling and

six times when it is said casually, with very little emo-

tion at all. These instances reflect the mixed linguistic

status of God.

In the phrase, "God--you're a doll!" spoken by Lester,

God seems to function as an intensifier. Lester says this

in obvious admiration of Jackie's feminine beauty. The

two of them are alone for a few minutes in Lester's office.

He is moved by the closeness of her physical presence; since

it is inconvenient to respond to her attractiveness in any way other than verbally, he says, "God--you're a doll!"

Jackie's nearness is obviously not making him think of God

the Deity. But her nearness is very arousing to him, and

in search of appropriate emotional outlet, he uses the word that has as its original referent the Deity. Such usage seems to demonstrate how language can become separated from reality and can then take on a new reality of its own or can serve a totally new function for the speaker. In this case, God serves purely emotive functions. It allows Lester to reveal his inner feeling and hopefully it affects the listener in a positive manner. God might here be classed as one of Hayakawa's "purr-words." Hayakawa said we use such words in the same way that lower animals wag their tails 128

or purr. Long before we developed language as we know it now, we probably made all sorts of animal cries to express such internal conditions as hunger, fear, triumph, and sexual desire. Hayakawa reminded us that, "although we

developed symbolic language, the habit of making noises

expressing rather than reporting, our internal conditions has remained. The result is that we use language in presymbolic ways; that is, as the equivalent of screams,

howls, purrs, and gibbering. . . . and there are many

occasions that demand good violent snarls, as well as 1 7 soft purrs of delight." "A soft purr of delight" seems

a good description for Lester's "God--you're a doll!"

Though emotion is expressed, it seems that a positive connotation places his usage in a different category from inverted taboo. However, it is interesting that

God can be used as both a "snarl word" and a "purr word."

The casual pronunciations of God occur exclusively in Cuckoo. McMurphyt frequent use of goddamn as a casual adjective might indicate that for him God is not on the list of English taboos. His use of the same phrase in anger signifies that he is not aware of the full import of his linguistic performance and is therefore not consciously but rather spontaneously reacting out of previously established patterns of speech. The contexts of McMurphy utterance of goddamn make it perfectly clear that he is not invoking the Deity to pronounce damnation 129

on anything. In fact, several sentences are ones of awe and admiration. Twice he is showing his respect for the Indian's physical size. Whe he first meets the Indian, he says, "God- damn! You're as big as a mountain! You must have played some football." Later, when the Indian has finally disclosed that he can speak, he reveals to McMurphy the fears which keep him at the hospital. He mentions his father's alcoholism and tells of watching his father shrivel up into nothing. The Indian is frightened by his own feelings of "littleness." Upon hearing this fear verbalized, McMurphy responds with denial. "You're about as big as a goddamn tree trunk!" he says. He is obviously impressed with the Indian's physical stature. These sentences are complimentary. Once McMurphy is boasting about himself when he claims, in a joking way, that he is a "goddamn marvel of modern science." This occurs early in Cuckoo during his first interview with the hospital administrator. They are discussing McMurphys history of getting arrested. McMurphy accurately pinpoints the reasons for his frequent arrests when he says, "I fight and fuck too much." In debating whether these activities should land him in jail, McMurphy says, "It doesn't make a goddamn bit of sense to me." After further discussion, the doctor tells him that he appears to be sane, and McMurphy jokingly replies, "I know; I'm a goddamn marvel of modern science." He twice uses goddamn in this conversation. At neither time does 130

it serve an affective purpose. It does not release tension for McMurphy himself nor convey an attitude toward the listener. Goddamn may function here as an intensifier, but if so, the added intensity is minimal, as it is later in the film when McMurphy tells fellow inmates, "Youtre not a goddamn loony now; you're a fisherman." McMurphy has successfully engineered a holiday away from the hospital. By climbing the fence during recreation period and sneaking into a bus, he manages to escape with a load of inmates. He heads for the water, confiscates a boat sitting at the dock, and takes the whole gang out for a day of fishing. It is soon after they board the ship that he tells them, in great exhilara- tion, "You're not a goddamn loony now; you're a fisherman!" His instruction proves valuable since someone from the wharf appears to challenge their embarkation and McMurphy fakes his credentials by introducing each man as a doctor from the state hospital.

The final time that McMurphy says goddamn in a casual manner occurs after his attempt to twist off the water faucet in the men's bathroom. He lacks the physical strength to achieve this feat, finally admits his inadequacy and walks off saying, "Well, I tried it, goddamn it." The words sound as though they might have been uttered in anger. However, such is not the case. McMurphy accepts his defeat casually; it does not seem to puncture his ego, and his sentence is said unemotionally. 131

In all of these casual utterances of God, the word

functions as a mild intensifier or as a space filler, but

not as a stigmatized term. Such casual usage does not meet

the specifications of inverted taboo, "the utterance of a word in order to feel the thrill of doing the forbidden,

to insult someone, or to express the jangled state of one's 1 8 nerves." Nor does this casual usage meet Read's require-

ment for breaking a taboo which entails using a word "unemo-

tionally in its simple literal sense." 1 9 Here again, my

analysis differs from Read's; I believe it is only the

unemotional use of the word that is crucial to its demise

as verbal taboo. All of the vocalizations of God in these

three contemporary films represent a weakening of the stigma

against the term. Any pronunciation at all violates the

taboo, and even in inverted taboo, the sound formation is

heard and the shock effect begins to lessen. Each subse-

quent vocalization of the word is less shocking until finally

casual usage begins. The process can be viewed on a contin-

uum where profane usage ranges from being accompanied by

great emotion to little or no emotion. The stigma against

the term weakens in correlation with increasing frequency

of non-emotional usage, and at some point on the continuum we must declare that the word has lost its taboo status.

In Jaws, Shampoo, and Cuckoo, the word God is used symbolically once. In two other instances there is a possibility that the reference is symbolic. Fourteen of the vocalizations 132

of God are hostile, negative, and non-symbolic. One is positive and non-symbolic, and the remaining six are casual and non-symbolic. Only the non-symbolic utterances constitute profanity and therefore fall into the category of verbal taboo. Using Read's guidelines on inverted taboo, two-thirds

of the profane uses would indicate God is still considered taboo. One-third of the profane examples are casual uses,

and I believe they indicate God is a term in transition from strict taboo to lesser taboo. Such mixed usage is a reflection of either gradually decreasing religious faith

on the part of the American public or perhaps of compartmentalized thinking which permits the retention of a concept of deity called God on the one hand but disassociates this concept with the god of oaths and profanity.

Conclusions

There are numerous points that can be made about Jesus and God as they are used in Jaws, Shampoo,and Cuckoo.

First of all, the two terms are almost never used symbolically in these three films. It has earlier been established that the American public is going to see films with which it identifies. These three films were all big box- office successes in 1975, one the biggest of all time.

They appear to reflect in some way the needs, interests, and ideas of contemporary society. Obviously conventional religious issues are not among those most burning to film audiences. If the heroes in these films struggle, it is an 133

existential struggle and only in that sense religious, not religious in the historical framework of Western Christianity. There is much depiction of man in interpersonal relationships but not in relation to his god. The very fact that no thread of a religious plot is present in any of the movies dictates that symbolic use of ecclesiastical terms is going to be absent or scarce.

Instead of symbolic use of Jesus and God, there is con- siderably more profane use of these terms in Jaws, Shampoo, and Cuckoo than the American public has condoned in the past. Once reserved for ecclesiastical use, the words God, Jesus, hell, and damn are all spoken in a profane way in the three films studied. For many years this was not permissable because it did not represent the way the American public saw itself. Perhaps the public's view was idealistic rather than realistic, but nonetheless, films have always bowed to commercial dictates, and the dollar decreed that profanity was in poor taste and unacceptable.

Something has changed profanity is now permissable and even earns a "PG" rating. What has happened linguistically to profanity is probably due to multi-factors. Certainly we are in a scientific age, schooled in logic and rational thinking and therefore less susceptible to word magic." Mentioning hell in speech has not sent anyone there, apparently. There is increased capacity to separate words from things in the minds of scientifically 134

trained Americans. The Scientific Age has also produced an ever-growing number of agnostics and atheists who either

deny or question the existence of a deity. For such people, the commandment, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," holds little threat. The non-Christian community has marshalled its strength in recent years to protest such things as Bible reading and prayer in public

schools. Such organized resistance to religious influence testifies to changing times in "Christian" America. It is inevitable that such change in beliefs be reflected in our language.

Profanity, in its present state of transition, mirrors the mixed state of our religious values. For example, a

dictionary definition of God indicates: "1) the Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe. . . . . 5) used to express disappointment, disbelief, weariness, frustration, annoyance, 20 or the like." The dictionary makes no attempt to establish the developmental links between definition one and definition five. The definitions seem totally different, and yet the latter really evolved from the former. The lexicographer, however, is not to be faulted. His job is to describe accurately the way American English is used, and God is indeed used with both of those meanings.

God and Jesus are undergoing linguistic schizophrenia. On the one hand, they still mean something religious to a part of the population who want to retain such meaning; these 135

are the symbolic speakers. On the other hand, they have lost their religious meaning for another part of the population who totally divorce the original referents from the sound forma, tions and who use the sound formations in new and different ways; these are the casual speakers for whom Jesus and God serve as exclamations and space fillers. In between these two extremes in the population stands another segment for whom the terms of profanity have subconscious religious meaning. These people may have rejected Christian dogma, but they have been culturally indoctrinated by their parents and by society and have assimilated the belief that profane terms carry some stigma. These speakers are the users of inverted taboo. Among the characters in these three films, McMurphy probably best represents the casual speaker who has suc- ceeded in divorcing taboo terms from their referents. This is particularly true with God. It is McMurphy who six times pronounces the word in low intensity, perhaps adding flavorr" to his speech as he talks about, "I'm a goddamn marvel of modern science," "you're not a goddamn looney now," "Youtre about as big as a goddamn tree trunk!,? "Goddamn, you look like you're as big as a mountain," "It doesn't make a goddamn bit of sense to me," and "I tried it, goddamn it." Not one of these statements readscorrectly if God were meant to be symbolic. It is obvious that McMurphy's vocalization of God in these instances does not intend the Deity as referent. 136

As already discussed, in anger he uses God several times as inverted taboo. Most of his pronunciations of Jesus are said either in great hostility or in mild irritation. This inconsistency in McMurphy's linguistic use of profanity probably accurately reflects his inconsistency toward the referents and toward the established order of society in general. McMurphy rejects the social value system. He lands in jail for "fighting and fucking too much," activities which are pleasurable to him. More than any other character in these three films, McMurphy has his own evaluations of life and has been trying to live by them. Unfortunately, his values

conflict with those of the community, and the established powers do not allow him to go his lone way. McMurphy has rejected the code and thereby becomes a threat. He has rejected the social hierarchy, as evidenced by his behavior when being interviewed by the hospital administrator. Mc- Murphy treats the doctor as though they were equals. He does not show submission nor obeisance, both of which would seem appropriate to the doctor. It is also consistent behavior for McMurphy to reject the positional authority of God, just as he rejects the doctor's positional authority. After all, God the Deity is the ultimate head of the established hierarchy in a "Christian" nation. Because of this attitude of rejection, McMurphy can use God casually, in total disregard of its stigma. Deliberate rejection of the linguistic code of verbal taboo is consistent with deliberate 137

rejection of the social hierarchy and of prescribed standards of behavior. However, he also feels sufficiently hostile toward society (including God as a subconscious ultimate in society's hierarchy), that he periodically explodes in anger. At such times, God, used as inverted taboo, becomes part of McMurphy's linguistic expression. Thus, within one character, McMurphy, there seems to be evidence of two segments of the American population which I have been discussing-those who wish to ignore the symbolic meaning of God, and those who wish to retain the power of God as an oath, which power is derived from an assimilated acceptance of the mystique of the referent and the stigma of the word. The religious segment of our population, those who would retain symbolic meaning for the terms Jesus and God, may be the ones fighting a losing battle right now. Des- pite their protests, profanity appears more and more frequently in films, television, newspapers, and periodicals. Talcott Parsons, Harvard sociologist, discussed the church's loss of authority to prescribe community standards: It is clear that by the standard of older ideals of Western Christianity organized religion has in lost much America. . . . Organized religion has lost right the to claim the support of the state by enforcement compulsory of uniformity or even by taxation either for a single established church or for any body. religious It has lost the right to control the main of lines the educational process, above all perhaps scribe to pre- the legitimate framework of secular intellectual culture, with special reference to philosophy. It also has lost the right to prescribe effectively vital certain matters of private morals, with special to reference marriage and family relationships.2 1 138

Judging from the increase in profanity and obscenity in movies, television, and the theatre, organized religion has also lost the right to prescribe verbal taboo for contemporary society. Granted that power is not on the side of organized religion, that adherents cannot restore the former power of "older ideals of Western Christianity" in American life today, the task for present-day puritans becomes, instead, how to cope with omni- present profanity. To remain sheltered from all vocalizations of profanity today is to live in a very narrow world, a world of few films and limited television. I suggest that one way religious people may be coping is through a compartmentaliza- tion in their thinking which allows them to distinguish between God the Deity, with a capital G, and god or goddamn, the oath, with a lower case g. One method of restoring cognitive balance for devout Christians may be denying that

goddamn is connected with God. Thus, the religious person need not be offended by goddamn because it is not an affront to his personal God but is only a homonym--with a different referent entirely. It is not difficult to ascertain the views of the religious toward profanity; they are against it. It is almost as easy to discuss the views of the irreligious toward profanity; they are against taboos. The views of the middle group are more complex, those who may be the users of inverted taboo and whose religious views are an unknown, even to themselves sometimes. 139

It has already been pointed out that persons who say Jesus and God in anger or irritation have in some way acceded power to those sound formations. Jesus and God become terms available for expressing strong emotion; as linguistic units, they are endowed with some mystique which makes them suitable for oaths. I believe there is good reason to conclude that the words Jesus and God carry power for those individuals who have either consciously or subconsciously assimilated a feeling about the referents. In pronouncing Jesus or God, speakers may make no conscious association with their referents. They may or may not hold conscious religious beliefs. Regardless of these variables, if they use inverted taboo, they have subscribed to a power theory regarding Jesus and God that comes from our culture. In discussing the pattern of reli-

gious organization in the United States, Parsons indicated, "There is a general Theism, which is even politically recog-

nized--as in the inscription on coins 'In God We Trust.' Further, sessions of Congress are regularly opened by Pro-

testant, Catholic, or Jewish clergymen offering prayer, and chaplains of all three faiths are provided by the Armed Services." 2 2 Amos N. Wilder, formerly Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, wrote about "the idea of the crucifixion, so deeply lodged in the Western consciousness.,"2 3 The cross as a symbol, and Jesus as a name are both familiar to Americans at an early age. There are many other examples of phenomena in our daily lives which 140

reveal a nationalistic background that is Judeo-Christian. In an earlier quoted passage, Parsons specified areas of life in the United States where organized religion had lost power or had never acquired it. He ended this paragraph by asking if organized religion has any remaining influence in the United States. His answer was that it does:

I should like to suggest that in American has, society there in its main outline, evolved the conception institutionalized of an Christianity which is in line the great with tradition of the Christian Society but from its earlier differs version in fundamental respects. First in order of evidence in favor of this view is the fact that the values of contemporary American fundamental society have religious roots, above all the traditions which Max Weber called "ascetic Protestantism." sentially Es- by this system of values I mean the continued commitment to values of "instrumental activism," subordination the of the personal needs of the individual to an objective "task" to which he is expected to vote his full de- energies, and the subjection of th actions of all to universalistic standards of judgment.' Parsons' point is that Christianity has become institutionalized in American life to a large extent. Its influence is still pervasive, even if less ecclesiastical. What began as the expression of heartfelt beliefs on the part of Founding Fathers, has become mere ritual for many modern Americans. In Philosophy in a NeKeyw , Susanne Langer explained the evolvement of religious ritual: Undoubtedly the first outward show of sacred emotions is purely self-expressive, an unconscious feelings. issue of . . . But as soon as an expressive act performed without is inner momentary compulsion it is no longer self-expressive; it is expressive logical in the sense. Instead of completing the natural history of a feeling, it denotes the may feeling, and merely bring it to mind. . . . A rite performed regularly is the constant reiteration of sentiments 141

toward "first and last things"; it is not a free expression of emotions, but a disciplined "right attitudes." rehearsal of . . . Human attitudes, vaguely recognized as reasonable and right, are expressed actions by which are not spontaneous emotional outlets but prescribed modes of participation and assent. It is thus in a spirit of ritual that we repeat in the pledge of allegiance, the words "one nation, under God." It is ritual when we say in marriage vows, "What God hath joined together let no man put asunder." When we swear in court to "tell the whole truth, so help me God," we are not expressing a genuine emotion, but are instead

acting according to "prescribed modes of participation and assent," as Langer indicated. We may not have consciously determined that we believe in God or in Jesus, but we have not consciously rejected belief in them either, and thus we are willing repeatedly to engage in "a disciplined rehearsal of 'right attitudes,'" even though those "right attitudes" have been decreed by someone else for us. There is some acknowledgement, "vaguely recognized as reasonable and right," Langer said. What follows next is acceptance of the taboo associated with pronouncing God or Jesus in spoken language. The taboo does not represent a personal decision of the speaker anymore than his repetition of "one nation, under God" represents a personal belief in a deity. It is simply cultural assimilation without "consciousness raising." Since Jesus and God are strongly stigmatized by society, they have intrinsic power. This power can be unleashed by pronouncing the words in the form of an oath. But as already 142

indicated, there is no power unless the words are accepted

as taboo, unless they are "forbidden" in ordinary conversation. If they are permitted in casual discussion, they are not meet for those times when oaths are desired. Thus, the user of inverted taboo decrees by his oath that he accepts the stigma against the sound formation. In the case of God and Jesus, the stigma stems from the sacredness of the referent; acceptance of the stigma is tantamount to acceptance of the sacred nature of the referents, though this may often be at a totally subconscious level.

There may be people whose linguistic performance with respect to profanity is consistent, e.g. devout Christians who always use Jesus and God symbolically and never profanely. However, most people in contemporary society are like characters in the films studied; they use Jesus and God in two or sometimes all three of the ways described above. Jesus and God may be spoken religiously, angrily, or casually, and usage varies from one time to the next. Profanity is in a state of transition and presently mirrors a multitude of changing values for individual speakers and for American culture. NOTES 1 Talcott Parsons, "The Pattern of Religious tion Organiza- in the United States," in y mbolism in Religion Literature, and Rollo May, ed. (New York: George BrazillTr~ 1960), pp. 166-167. 2 Steve E. Lodle, "Sexual and Excretory Vernacular: A Delineative Examination and Empirical Analysis of the Nature, Scope, and Function of Taboo, Inhibitory, Euphemistic, and Dysphemistic Communication Paradigms," unpub. (California master's thesis State College, Long Beach, 1972), pp. 40-41. 3 Peter Fryer, Mrs. Grundy, Studies in English (London: Prudery, Dennis Dob-son,T , pp. 237V278. TheUniversity of California Language Department was asked in 1963 a study of to make possibly objectionable three-letter combinations. As a result, the following prefixes, among others, were banned from California license plates: SEX, WED, BRA, ALE, BAD, BAG BAH, BED, CAN, DAM, DUD, FAT, GOD7~TAG,NAG~NUN,~~RT~~_A , __R, _, AND 5 ATAW

4 Four sources were used for etymological and lexicographical data:

Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological of the Dictionary English Language (Amsterdam, London, New York:METlsvier PiblTshing Co., 1966). C.T. Onions, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of English Ety- mology (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1966.

, ed., The Shorter Oxford English Dictionar on Historical Princiles-7d Pres7t Prnbs, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University

Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological of Modern Dictionar En , 2nd ed. (New YoFrITnMacMillan, 1959 These sources are widely recognized and considered authoritative by linguists and dialectologists. Inquiry into the four terms studied in this thesis revealed that no contradiction existed among these four reference sources; instead, duplication a great deal of of information was found. All given etymological data in this treatise comes from the and single four sources listed above, datum is not henceforth footnoted individually.

143 144

A1len Walker Read, "An Obscenity Symbol," American Seech, 9 (1934), 274.

6 Read, p. 274.

7Read, p. 274.

8 Read, p. 274. 9 C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Study of Meanin the Influence of Language~Uton Tand 1 1ence o the 2 olism(w~~ork: Harcourt, Brace aTndC"iffpany,

1 0Read, pp. 274, 277. .40nions, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, p. 404.

12 Ogden and Richards, p. 234. 1 3 Edward Sapir, Culture, Language and Personalit (Ber- keley, Los Angeles: Univ. of Ca7lIf3orn7i-Press, 1960 , p. 11. l4S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Action (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1939, 1940), p776. 1 5 0gden and Richards, pp. 234-235.

1 6Read, p. 274. 1 7 Hayakawa, pp. 74, 78. 1 8 Read, p. 274. 19 Read, p. 274. 2 0Laurence Urdang, ed., The Random House (New College Dictionary York: Random House, Inc.~ T~77, p. 565. 2 1Parsons, pp. 166-167.

22 Parsons, pp. 170-171. 2 3Amos N. Wilder, "TheaCross: Social in jymboism Trauma or Redemption," and Religion and Literature, Rollo May, York: George~Traziller,1-), p. 109. ed. (New

2 4Parsons, pp. 167-168. 2 5 Susanne K. Langer, Philosohy ther Urism in a New y, A t ofPReasons, Ritean)Ap~~ 2 r-de, Mas s Study in I'avari-iivTrTty Press,-l9sl), p. 12-153, 162. CHAPTER V

SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF OBSCENE WORDS Obscenity has been defined earlier in this thesis as the use of either sexual or scatological terms deemed offensive to the community. It has also been established previously that obscene words are always taboo whereas profane words are acceptable when used ecclesiastically and taboo only when used sacrilegiously.

Obscene words pertain in some way to sex (fuck, screw, bastard), or to excretion (shit, piss), or to the organs of the body directly concerned with these two functions (cock, prick, cunt, ass). In the three movies studied, Jaws, Shampoo, and Cuckoo, the following obscene terms are spoken: ass, bastard, butt, cocksucker, crap, cunt, fuck, jerking-off, pissed-off, screw, shit, supercock, and whore. Two of these, fuck and ass, will be examined in detail in this chapter. Fuck is the most frequent obscenity in the films, uttered thirty-five times. Shit is spoken thirty-three times, and ass twenty-one times. All other obscenities are vocalized only once or twice. My original intent was to examine three obscene words individually, fuck, shit, and ass. As analysis began, however, I discovered that considerable detail would be necessary in order to properly substantiate any findings. Therefore, in order to stay within reasonable limitations in

145 146

length in a master's thesis, my original intent was modified. In eliminating one of the three words, I chose to omit shit because preliminary analysis revealed that it is used with less linguistic variety than are fuck and ass.

Obscenity--Fuck

Perhaps fuck is the most linguistically interesting word in these three films. Despite the fact that the word does not appear at all in Jaws, its use in Shampoo and Cuckoo reflects such variety that intriguing questions about meaning are raised. I.A. Richards believed that to ascertain meaning is the first and foremost responsibility of communicators, and the study of fuck in Shampoo and Cuckoo provides a fertile field to apply Richards' concepts of microscopic examination. 1 Fuck is spoken thirty-five times, ten times in Shampoo and twenty-five times in Cuckoo. It appears in the following word forms:

Shampoo Cuckoo

fuck 7 fuck 4 fucking 1 fucking 19 fucked 2 motherfucker 1 Fuck is an English word dating back at least as far as 1503. The ultimate origin of the word is unknown. Etymolo- gical sources indicate a connection with German ficken which means "to strike" or "to copulate with," but specify that direct descent from ficken is impossible. Partridge pointed out that fuck is obviously related to both German ficken and to Latin futuere but not wholly derived from either; apparently 147

fuck combines the vocalism of futuere and the consonantism of ficken. Partridge speculated on possible earlier origins of futuere, and though nothing is definite, he is quite sure that the source of fuck long antedates Latin. In fact, he discussed, "a strikingly ancient etymon," found in the Egyptian word petcha. The word refers to males and means "to copulate with." Partridge calls the hieroglyph "an ideogram of unmis- takably assertive virility." 2

Data on the etymological history of fuck is severely limited by the fact that the word has been omitted from most printed records for many years. In fact, Partridge, writing in 1959, used f**k instead of fuck throughout his entire reference, and the term is not included at all in the 1966 Ox- ford Dictionary of English Etymology nor Klein's 1966 A Com- prehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, two of the four sources used in this thesis for etymological data. The first dictionary appearance of fuck was in John Florio's Worlde of Wordes in 1598.3 The word was listed with four others having the same meaning--jape, sard, swive, and occupy. By the seventeenth century, however, an in- creasingly hostile feeling developed toward "low terms," and lexicographers began to reject all "obsolete, bad, low, and despicable words." Fuck has thus been relegated to forbidden status since approximately 1650, and Dr. Samuel Johnson did not include the term in his Dictionary in the mid-1700's. 148

Webster reinforced the pattern by omitting fuck from every single edition of his dictionaries in the 1800's. In fact, even the third and most recent edition of Webster's New In- ternational Dictionary (1962) does not include fuck. This four-letter word reigns as the leading taboo word in English and yet has remained unacknowledged in dictionaries for over three hundred years. Certainly this longevity says something about the power of fuck. Perhaps its power has even been magnified by its clandestine status; curious youngsters have had literally no place to go to seek factual information about the symbols f-u-c-k seen at early ages on side- walks and bathroom walls. Perhaps this in itself has led to the variety of ways in which the word is now used. "In the entire language of proscribed words," claimed Sagarin in his book The Anatomy of Dirty Words, "from slang to profanity, from the mildly unclean to the utterly obscene, including terms relating to concealed parts of the body, to excretion and excrement as well as to sexuality, one word reigns supreme, unchallenged in its pre-eminence. It sits upon a throne, an absolute monarch. . . . When one sees a word written as f followed by a dash or some asterisks, as f-- or f***, one need not wonder whether the term refers to fair or foul, to fame or folly, to fathead or fatuousness. The monarch reigns 5 over the language." So universally known is fuck and such is its power, that advertisers and artists have used it subliminally.6 An advertiser need show no more 149

than a shadowy f-u- and the American mind will fill in the rest for him. F may be sufficient often, since the appeal is to the subconscious and not the conscious mind. It has long been known that under the influence of anesthetics, when the subconscious is in control, patients of all ages and social positions use taboo words such as fuck with great abandon.7 In examining fuck as it is spoken in Shampoo and Cuckoo, it is apparent that the term functions in a different grammatical structure in each movie. For example, in Cuckoo, nineteen of the twenty-five times the word is spoken it takes the form of fucking and is used as an adjective and an adverb to modify several types of words. The participial form is commonly heard on the streets and on the college campus, yet fuck is not once used in this way in Shampoo. The sole time the ing form is heard in Shampoo it is not as an adjective but as a verb when Lester peeps through the window, views a couple engaged in sexual intercourse and says, "That's what I call fucking!" Fuck has become a very expansive word, evidently, since in these two films it is used as a verb, an adjective, a noun, and an adverb.

An analysis of symbolic and non-symbolic reference when fuck is spoken revealed the following:

Shampoo Cuckoo Symbolic 5 1 Non-symbolic 4 24 Mixed 1 150

This division of usage in Shampoo is interesting in itself, since the percent of symbolic reference is so much higher than in Cuckoo or in other contemporary films. For example, fuck is spoken forty-one times in DgDay_ Afternoon, and only one of those times does the speaker mean sexual intercourse. Perhaps this variance is because of film content. Since Shampoo is a film about sexual adventures, its characters may have more occasion to use fuck in a sexual context. A generalization can be made that when fuck is used symbolically in Shampoo, the attitude of the speaker is positive (at least toward sexual intercourse), but when it is used non-symbolically, the attitude of the speaker is negative and hostile. In Cuckoo, the sole symbolic utterance of fuck indicates a positive attitude toward the activity, but the twenty-four instances of non-symbolic pronunciation are divided: fourteen of them seem hostile, ranging from mild annoyance to pure anger, and ten of them seem casual or emotionally neutral in character. All of this presents an enigma to one attempting to discern the emotional feeling toward sexual intercourse by studying the way in which fuck is used.

Of the six symbolic utterances of fuck, three are voiced by George, one by Lester, one by Lester and Felicia's daughter, and one by McMurphy in Cuckoo. Perhaps this balance is apropos., because of all the characters in the three films, it is George whose main activity is sex. 151

Two of his symbolic vocalizations of fuck occur in the same scene and are said to Jill. Both times a very positive attitude toward the referent is indicated. Toward the end of Shampoo, George is discovered having sexual intercourse with his former girlfriend, Jackie, in a back yard pool house during a party. His present girlfriend, Jill, is irate and immediately leaves the party. When George next confronts her, he attempts to apologize and to resume their relationship. However, Jill is now suspicious and inquires whether George has been "unfaithful" more than once. George finally confesses his sexual exploits and admits, "Let's face it; I fucked them all." He goes on to explain that the reason for his frequent involvement is that the women are all so attractive, they smell so good and look so beautiful. "Sometimes I fuck them," he says again. "It makes me feel like I'm gonna live forever." These two uses definitely reflect a positive attitude toward the activity of sexual intercourse. It is pleasurable; it seems to promote longevity; it is irresistible. Lester apparently feels just as strongly about the desirability of the activity, though he does not have as much opportunity for participation as does George. It is Lester who peeps through the window of the pool house and discovers George and Jackie in the act of sexual intercourse. Before their identities are clearly established, Lester stares at the moving shape of their bodies on the floor and says in 152

awe and admiration, "That's what I call fucking " He would obviously like to change places with the unidentified man. The most non-emotional, and therefore the most taboo- breaking, usage of fuck is by Felicia's daughter. She simply asks George, "Wanna fuck?" George has come to the house to comb out Felicia's hair, but since her mother has gone on an errand, the daughter volunteers to entertain George in her stead. They are both in the kitchen snacking on a tray of food. George has attempted to avoid her blunt questions regarding whether he is a homosexual and whether he is having an affair with Felicia. Finally, George says, "Look, can't we just be friends?" Whereupon, the daughter replies, "O.K. Wanna fuck?" She uses the word casually and in its simple literal sense, thus employing Read's methodology for breaking a verbal taboo. George does the same thing later in the film. Audience reaction to the daughter's usage is hilarity, indicating that for them the term is still taboo. Of course, it may well be for the filmmaker too, since he probably planned the daughter's pronouncement to elicit laughter. George's third symbolic use of fuck occurs when he is talking with Jackie, his former girlfriend. Felicia, a customer at the beauty parlor and also a frequent bedpartner for George, wants to help him obtain funds for his own business. She arranges for him to meet her wealthy husband, Lester. While George is engaged in conversation with Lester, 153

in the office of the latter, Jackie unexpectedly bursts in the door. The entanglements of relationships are farcical and resemble television soap opera. Each member of the trio is unaware that the other two members are acquainted. George immediately perceives that Jackie is having an affair with Lester. Later, when both George and Jackie leave the building together, they engage in discussion about their current activities and social life. It is obvious that George has not yet attained business success. He is still trying to open his own shop, still asking other people for money. In defensiveness, and probably also in jealousy, George strikes out at Jackie by saying, "Atleast I don't fuck anyone for money. I do it for fun." This is an unwelcome accusation, and a moment later he apologizes and asks, "Hey, want me to do your hair?" In Shampoo, whenever George asks a woman if she wants her hair done, he is mas- querading behind linguistic symbols; his real invitation is for sexual intercourse. George's use of fuck in this instance is referential. He uses the word literally and biologically. Though the attitude expressed toward the listener is momen- tarily negative, the attitude expressed toward the referent is still positive. George is jealous that someone else is now intimate with Jackie. Lester not only has money and positional power which George does not, but he also has the girl George no longer has. George does not feel very good about all this, but he still shows a positive attitude toward 154

the referent of sexual intercourse. His opinion is that sexual activity should have intrinsic pleasure and not be done for money. To accept money degrades the act. McMurphy'ssymbolic utterance of fuck occurs early in Cuckoo when he is being interviewed by the hospital administrator. The doctor asks McMurphy why anyone might want to evaluate his sanity. McMurphy's answer is, "Because I fight and fuck too much, I guess." One has a definite feeling from McMurphy's tone of voice, his posture, and his joviality, that he greatly enjoys both of the activities which keep landing him in jail. In the doctor's office and again later in group therapy he indicates that the normal pursuit of any red-blooded male should be "birddogging chicks" and "banging beaver." In fact, he literally uses sexual intercourse theraputically when he sets Billy up with his girl friend, in full awareness of the healing effect he believes sexual union will have on Billy. Obviously, McMurphys attitude toward sexual intercourse is positive, at least part of the time. His literal use of fuck in this sentence helps establish his identity for viewers of the film. It says that McMurphy is a "free spirit." Not only does he engage in activities which break the moral code (fighting and fucking), but he breaks the linguistic code by his forthright description of his actions. Furthermore, he is neither apologetic nor rebellious about his language or his behavior. He has declared his independence from the established community and its value system; he feels as free 155

to pronounce fuck as he does to engage in the activity which it describes. His casual employment of the term is the equivalent of Felicia's daughter utterance in Shampoo. However, this is the only time McMurphy uses fuck symbolically; all of his other vocalizations are non-symbolic, some filled with hostile emotion, but most said casually. The common denominator of the six symbolic pronunciations of fuck seems to be the positive attitude toward the referent which is expressed in all instances. A common denominator among the twenty-eight non-symbolic vocalizations is much more difficult to ascertain. When used non- symbolically, fuck expresses both strong feeling and casualness, both hostility and warmth. The term is employed grammatically as a verb, an adjective, a noun and an interjection. The variety of nuances expressed and the parts of speech employed make linguistic analysis of fuck a re- warding endeavor.

In accord with the pattern of examination already established for profanity, the non-symbolic utterances of fuck are divided into two categories--emotional and casual. The emotional category is further subdivided into those examples where great anger and hostility are expressed and those examples where only mild annoyance and irritation are indicated. There are eleven examples in Shampoo and Cuckoo of fuck accompanying the expression of real anger. Two occur early in Cuckoo when McMurphy is attending his first session of 156

group therapy. Discussion centers on the patient Harding and his sexual relations with his wife. When Nurse Ratched asks him a question regarding their marriage, Harding cannot answer simply but becomes very intellectual, ambiguous, and abstract. Harding's theorizing triggers hostility in the inmate named Taber who says to him angrily, "You're so fucking dumb, Harding, I can't believe it." His comment causes an argument which escalates as other patients take sides and become involved. Talk is fast and furious; chaos reigns. Through the layers of conversation, Harding can be heard still defending his concepts. "I'm talking about Form! When are you ever going to get that through yourfucking head?" he asks in anger. A short while later, McMurphy uses fucking twice in real hostility. While playing cards on the ward, he is frustrated by Martini's genuine irrationality. He has tried futilely to explain the rules of blackjack to Martini and all to no avail. As McMurphy deals the cards and queries players about their desires for an additional face-up card, Martini keeps repeating the words, "Hit me, hit me." McMurphy tells him he is out of turn and not playing according to the rules. But Martini continues his verbal pestering. Finally, McMurphy deals him a card which puts Martini's total over twenty-one and therefore disqualifies him from further play. However, Martini denies that he is eliminated and claims he has thirteen points. McMurphy's anger has been building steadily throughout this episode. He turnsto Martini and 157

yells, "This is a fucking queen! You're out." Even then Martini continues to say "hit me" over and over again. The loud music on the ward increases the tension on McMurphys nerves. Finally, he jumps up from the table and heads for the office saying, "Jesus Christ! Are you nuts gonna play cards or fucking jerk-off?" His objective in striding toward the office is to get the music turned down to a lower volume. The syntax of the question he asks as he leaps up

from the table is peculiar and reflects McMurphy's idiosyncratic linguistic style. The structure of the question is unusual, and the last two words are referential opposites.

Fucking, when used literally, refers to an act of intercourse between two persons. Jerk-off (more often heard in the form

of jerking-off) refers to an act of masturbation involving just one person. McMurphy uses the two words in juxaposition, one modifying the other. This is certainly proof that the

words are far divorced in McMurphy's conscious mind from their referents.

Another instance of fuck accompanying the expression

of real anger occurs soon after the scene just described above. Although McMurphy is not successful at getting the music turned down, he is forced to take his medication while he is at the office. He attempts a mild protest, but then places the pill in his mouth and agreeably swallows his juice. When he returns to the other patients at the card table, Harding says to him mockingly, "Well, lover boy, why 158

didn't you tell her (Nurse Ratched) to go fuck herself?" This is the closest reference in either movie to the familiar "Fuck you!" expression. Apparently the phrase fuck yo is losing ground to other forms, such as the par- ticiple fucking, used as a modifier. The attitude expressed by Harding in this statement is negative. He is taunting McMurphy for not demonstrating his contempt for Nurse Ratched. McMurphy is newly arrived and making an obvious bid for leadership of the inmates. Yet, he has just been unsuccessful in his attempt to openly confront Nurse Ratched about the medication. In reply to Harding's mocking, McMurphy opens his mouth, reveals the unswallowed pill still on his tongue, and then spits the pill at Harding in gleeful scorn. Harding's use of fuck accompanies a negative attitude toward his audience, McMurphy, but also toward the third party subject of discussion, Nurse Ratched. Since there exists such a strong taboo against the work fuck, one way Harding can show his fantasied rejection of Ratched's authority is by flaunting a "forbidden" word. The question still arises, however, why this particular linguistic phrase, fuck you or fuck herself, is the ultimate of maledictions. Perhaps the inmate is not referring to sexual intercourse but is instead directing Nurse Ratched toward masturbation. Perhaps the curse is that she will have no sexual partner but will have to satisfy her own needs in loneliness and masturbation. Does the negative connotation come from such an inference 159

as this? If so, the taboo is intensified since masturbation

is both a clandestine conversation subject and a clandestine activity in American culture.

Only once is fuck spoken in a non-symbolic way by a

female. In Shampoo, it is voiced by Jackie, who represents the most depraved woman in the movie, according to Pauline

Kael, film critic for the New Yorker.8 When Jackie says

fuck she is exceedingly intoxicated. She has earlier ar-

rived at Lester's election-night party with intentions not

to partake of alcoholic beverages. However, since she feels Lester has both ignored her and criticized her in front of

George, she begins to drink in retaliation. She is thoroughly

intoxicated by the time dinner is served. At the table she disgraces herself by motioning to George seated beside her and announcing that she would really like to "suck his cock." After she attempts to do this, right at the dinner table, Lester intervenes and orders George to take her home. As they leave Bistro's, the expensive restaurant where the party is held, George reminds Jackie that her fur coat is in the coat-check room. In drunken stupor, Jackie says,

"Oh, fuck it," and they depart without the coat. Jackie is angry and feeling very uninhibited. She might not use this phrase if she were sober, but coming when she is intoxicated, fuck represents her true linguistic choice.

Certainly, the term is used in hostility toward Lester. The question is whether she is also hostile toward the 160

referent, sexual intercourse. It is interesting that Jackie uses fuck in the form of a verb but that her command is absolutely impossible in a literal sense since an inanimate

object is involved. As a verb, fuck is used in these films

in conjunction with interpersonal relationships, with an

intrapersonal relationship, and with inanimate objects.

Such is the linguistic confusion which surrounds the word.

I believe it is safe to infer that Jackie's attitude toward

the referent, toward the sex act, is as negative as her

non-symbolic use of the term with reference to her coat.

She has prostituted herself to Lester in exchange for pretty clothes, a sleek sports car, and a nice apartment. She does

not seem happy with the bargain nor with herself. If exces-

sive drinking is one of the indices of self-esteem, Jackie's

is low. Sex with George is appealing to her, but she chooses

instead to engage in sex with Lester who is not attractive to her as a human being. Therefore, sex with Lester is tainted by her hypocrisy. On the other hand, any revewal of sex with George would be tainted by the need for secrecy and the fear of discovery. Jackie says fuck in anger, and I believe her linguistic performance mirrors her anger at the confusion which exists in her own sexual values.

There are five instances in Cuckoo where fucking is an adjective used in angry expression. The word functions as a release valve several times when angry inmates get into arguments with each other or with Nurse Ratched. 161

'This on your fucking rule!" Cheswick screams at Ratched

after she has confiscated his cigarettes. Cheswick is

frantic, nervous, and physically uncomfortable because of

this deprivation. "I ain't no little kid," he shouts.

"I want something done. I want something done. I want

something done!" The escalation of noise and chaos gets on McMurphy's nerves. McMurphy says to another patient, "Give him a cigarette,will you, Harding?" When Harding

replies that he has none left, McMurphy's fury is swift

to surface. "That's a fucking lie!" he yells and commands Harding, "Give him a cigarette!"

During a short argument in the tub-room, fucking is

used three times. Two patients, Harding and Martini, are

playing a game of monopoly. Other inmates, Taber, Sefelt,

and Billy, and McMurphy, are also in the room. Taber begins to hassle Harding. Others take sides, and a full-blown argument is soon in progress. Some of the words are in- distinguishable, but once fucking is heard by itself; none of the surrounding words is audible. It seems significant that I, as a listener, can more readily identify fuck than any other word. This testifies to the cultural indoctrination of the taboo which appears to be deeply ingrained in our psyches. During the argument, Harding asks, "What are you picking on me for?" and Taber replies, "Fucking jerk." McMurphy finallydissolves the escalating battle by squirting all the participants with a water hose. He then 162

announces that he is going downtown to watch the world series baseball game on television. Billy tells him that it is impossible to leave the hospital. Sefelt whispers to another inmate in great delight, "Maybe he'll just show Nurse Ratched

his big thing and she'll open the door for him." McMurphy

replies, "Maybe I'll do just that. And then again, maybe

I'll use your fucking head, Sefelt, to bash open the door."

Throughout this tub-room episode, it is apparent that the men

are angry and that fucking is a way they perceive that they

can communicate their anger, insult each other, and ventilate strong emotion.

Fuck in its ing form, as an adjective, is spoken in mild annoyance as well as in great anger. At one point in Cuckoo, McMurphy attempts the physical feat of lifting a water faucet from its concrete foundation. Amidst the straining of muscles, he mutters, ". . . the fucking thing." Though he does not succeed at his task, McMurphy remains in good spirits and takes his defeat casually. The above phrase is not said as a true malediction, but rather as an expression of annoyance.

A guest at Lester's party is similarly annoyed when Lester pours a drink all over his arm. Playing the proper host, Lester fills his guest's champagne glass. However, Lester is nervous, worried about Jackie's behavior at the party and about his wife's reaction to Jackie's presence. In distraction,

Lester continues to pour from the bottle and the glass over- flows, getting liquid all over the hand of the guest who says 163

in irritation, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" This structure of the term is similar to that employed often with hell in What the hell. George uses this structure withhell once in Shampoo when he tells Jackie that he dreamed he was fifty years old and living with Jill. "It scared the hell out of me," he says to Jackie. Here the same structure is used with fuck, and one can only infer that the coupling of the two words the and fuck turns them into adjectival intensifiers, meant only to add a degree of strength to the speaker's pronouncement. Another way fuck functions grammatically when the speakers intent is to express annoyance or irritation is as a verb. In group therapy, McMurphy proposes a change in hospital routine which will enable the inmates to watch the World Series baseball game on television. Nurse Ratched replies, "Mr. McMurphy, I don't believe you understand how important the schedule is here. It takes some of our patients a very long, long time to adjust to the schedule." McMurphy says, "Fuck the schedule. They can go back to the schedule after the World Series." Later in this scene, his complaints are voiced with real anger, but at this moment his intensity is less, because he simply does not believe yet that he will not be able to obtain his goal.

During a basketball game in which the guards are pitted against the patients, the Indian suddenly catches on to the object of the contest. He not only tosses a ball into the 164

patients' basket, but he walks down to the opposite end and pushes the ball out of the guards' basket, preventing their two-point score. When one guard, Mr. Warren, realizes what is happening, he says, "Fuck that shit!" The emotional tenor of his remark seems to be midway between astonishment and irritation. His statement is linguistically interesting. Ob- viously the terms fuck and shit are both far from their symbolic referents and are chosen by the guard only because they are stigmatized words.

Fuck expresses George's tired irritation when he uses it as an interjection once in Shampoo. George is being re- primanded by Norman, his boss at the beauty parlor, for not

conforming to time schedules. He seems to appear and dis-

appear at the beauty parlor according to whimsy. Such elusiveness does not set well with Norman, who tries to explain to him the pragmatic value of keeping his appointments. To his lecture, George replies, "Aw, fuck, Norman." It is not deep anger that George is ventilating. What he feels is, "Here we go again: same old story." He is tired of being chastized and is able to communicate successfully this reaction to both Norman and the viewing audience even though nothing in the three words he utters conveys it denotatively.

In the last two examples of annoyance or irritation, fuck is spoken in a compound word. In the first instance, the term is motherfuckers, and in the second instance it is 165

fuck p. Both are nouns. The fact that motherfucker is pronounced at all in a film is significant since it is considered by some linguists to be the most taboo word in American English.9 Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver called motherfucker "a very functional term in the black community,"10 and apparently in accurate reflection of this, it is a black person who says motherfucker in Cuckoo. Cleaver went on to explain the matri- archal family structure often found in the black community and asserted, "By using the term motherfucker, man, you're doing the worst thing that a human being can do." Such a judgment of the word would almost dictate that its use accompany feelings of great intensity and negativity. However, this is only part of the tenor of its utterance in Cuckoo. The black guard who says it seems to be despondent, dejected, and discouraged, as well as angry. Of course, he is also drunk, and this may contribute to both his vocalization of motherfucker, something he might not do with inhibitions intact, and to his low intensity when using the term. Intox- ication has obviously affected the energy level of his body, and though he knows that calamity has struck, he simply cannot gather up sufficient strength to do anything about it. Bribed by booze and the implied promise of sexual relations, the guard has allowed two women to enter the hospital, friends of McMurphy. The women have brought with them a large quantity of liquor which is soon circulating among the inmates. When the guard discovers that a party 166

is in progress on the floor of the ward, he is dismayed and attempts to get the inmates back into bed. However, a buzzer warns him that the night supervisor is approaching, and in panic, everyone scrambles into the office to hide. After the supervisor leaves, the guard realizes what a catastrophe has developed, and almost with a moan, he says, "Get out of here, get out of here, you motherfuckers." Alcohol has taken its effect by this time, and the guard does not have the ability to enforce his command, which is more nearly a request than a command. Stripped of personal authority, the guard sinks despondently to the couch, and the next time the camera cuts to him, he is sleeping. Calling the patients motherfuckers is malevolent, of course. But liquor has tempered the fero-

city which might have otherwise prevailed, and the statement must be categorized under irritation rather than strong anger.

Toward the end of Shampoo, George uses fuck-up as a noun to describe himself. Jill has said a final goodby to George. Returning to the beauty parlor, George learns that his boss's son has just been killed in an automobile accident. Evidently overwhelmed by the knowledge that death is inevitable and perhaps even imminent, George undergoes conversicnrand decides it is time to settle down and begin a different type of life. He rushes to Jackie's apartment only to find that he must follow her car on a long chase high into the Hollywood Hills before he has an opportunity to talk with her. When finally he gets her attention, he proposes to her. "I want you to 167

marry me," he says. "I want to take care of you. I want us to have a baby. I know I'm a fuck-up, but I swear to God I'll make you happy." This stream of feeling is accompanied by crying and begging on George's part. "I don't trust anybody but you," he tells Jackie after she explains that it is too late; she has already agreed to leave town and to marry Lester. George is on his knees before his proposal is finished. Jackie is dressed all in white. There is a great deal of traditional marriage symbolism associated with the scene. As she witnesses his sorrow, Jackie puts her arms around George and holds him maternally, comforting him as one would a child. She has turned from the depraved prostitute into the madonna mother. In the middle of all this is George's utterance of fuck-up. It is meant as an apology, an admission of inadequacy, of failure. In other instances in Shampoo and Cuckoo, fuck has been used non-symbolically in episodes of confrontation, to express the negative attitude of the speaker toward the listener. In this instance, however, the word acquires its negative nature not by virtue of the hostile mood of the speaker, but by virtue of its inferred meaning. George uses fuck-up to express an obviously negative evaluation of himself. Sagarin, in his book The Anatomy of Dirty Words, said that the expression fucked-up is normally used to indicate "mixed up, disarray, improper 1 2 handling, ineptness." One of the more familiar combinations of fuck and u in American English is situation- 168

normal-all-fucked up, the infamous phrase from the Second World War known more widely by its acronym, snafu.

Analysis thus far has shown that when fuck is used non-symbolically in an emotional way, the emotion demonstrated is consistently negative. Sometimes it may be very intense emotion, properly called anger or hostility. At other times, the emotion may be less intense, more accurately described as annoyance or irritation. But always it is negative in conno-

tation. This observation concurs with Sagarin's. "Whatever the context, whatever the expression," he said, "fuck is sur- rounded with defamatory and derogatory connotations in its nonsexual usage."13 However, what is to come next, an examination of the casual non-symbolic pronunciations of

fuck, modifies Sagarin's statement, for within this category examples of positive connotation do exist.

There are ten examples of fuck being spoken in a casual way, and they all occur in Cuckoo. Eight of the ten are voiced by McMurphy and always in the ing form, using fucking as an adjectival modifier. His usage typifies the language strategy of reducing the impact of a verbal taboo by unemotional repetition of the sound formation, to the point, even, of ludicrousness. Six of the vocalizations are heard in the same episode, McMurphy's unsuccessful attempt to watch the World Series baseball games on television. Perhaps one of the few things McMurphy has not rejected about the "great

American tradition" is baseball. He has never missed 169

a World Series, and he is absolutely appalled at the thought that he may have to miss one now. His frustration seems to be double-edged; his selfish desires are thwarted, but he is also aware that watching the game would be enjoyable for other patients and theraputic as well. His frustration mounts as Nurse Ratched's strategies begin to dawn on him. Her objective is not really to help the men improve, or to involve them in the outside world again. Her objective is really to retain power over them. In response to McMurphy's badgering requests to watch the game, Ratched finally agrees to settle it the "democratic" way with a vote among the men. McMurphy's first response is elation since he knows the inmates want the game. However, when many decline to raise their hands, he realizes for the first time the degree of fear and dependency they have. McMurphy encourages the men to vote their true desires, and one by one hands creep up in the air, until finally only one more vote is needed. At this point, McMurphy tries to solicit the votes of the less rational patients on the ward. "For Christ's sake," he says, "Isn't there one of you fucking maniacs that knows what I'm talking about? There's gotta be one guy in here that's not a total fucking nut." It was difficult to decide whether these two pronunciations of fuck should be classified as casual or emotional. It is true that McMurphy is annoyed, and the decision to place these utterances in the casual category was simply based on a comparison of the degree of emotion demonstrated. The scale of 170

emotional intensity runs from anger to annoyance to casualness to no-emotion on a sliding continuum, making mid-points between categories difficult to distinguish. McMurphy finally procures the winning vote for the baseball game, but Nurse Ratched has already ended the group therapy session. She declares the vote invalid and returns to her office in triumph. However, McMurphy has gleaned insight from the incident. He perceives that a power struggle between himself and Ratched is basic to the problem. He realizes that the "insane" are saner than the sane, in some ways. Determined to have his

own victory, he walks to the television set and begins to fantasize that he is watching the baseball game. His excite- ment grows as he begins to dramatize. All the other patients gather around and follow his lead. "Oh, oh," McMurphy says,

"That pitcher's in big fucking trouble. Bases loaded. Koufax'd better watch out." He continues a line of patter for several minutes with enthusiasm mounting all the time. "Look at that! He went off like a fucking firecracker!" "Here comes the great Mickey Mantle up to bat. . . It's a fucking homerun!" he shouts, and the group of inmates all cheer loudly. As might be expected, Nurse Ratched intervenes at this point and breaks up the hilarity. Shortly after this, McMurphy is sitting in the administrator's office saying, "That fucking nurse, man. Something of a cunt, ain't she, doc?" McMurphy's tone is still casual. He doesn't like Nurse Ratched, but he doesn't expect to 171

lose the battle either, at this point. He is not yet aware

that his commitment to the hospital is permanent rather than

temporary. Fucking as used to modify nurse, and earlier to

modify maniacs and nuts, has a slightly negative connotation.

However, what can be said about its use during the baseball

game? It is certainly not negative then. The fantasy of the

baseball game is really an act of defiance against Nurse

Ratched. Perhaps fuck is used so frequently because, as one

of the most taboo words in American English, it best serves

McMurphy's need to reject authority in this episode. Ratched

may be able to control the television, but McMurphy still makes his own decisions about his language, and he can

flaunt his casual repetition of fuck in awareness, probably, that the term remains taboo for Ratched.

Once more in the film, McMurphy uses fucking as an adjective. When he learns that the Indian can both hear and speak, McMurphy is astonished. As the impact of it sinks in, and he realizes neither of them is insane, he says to the Indian, "What are we doing in this fucking place?" Out of context, it sounds as though this question might have been voiced in anger, hostility, or at least in annoyance.

It is true that by this time, McMurphy has had enough of the hospital and has become aware of the insidious intent of Nurse Ratched. However, when he poses this question to the Indian, he is not really displaying much emotion.

Fucking functions as a casual adjective, as it has so often in McMurphy's speech. 172

Others in the cast of Cuckoo demonstrate similar casual

use of fuck. Toward the beginning of the movie when McMurphy first attempts to teach Chief Bromden how to play basketball, one of the guards asks, "What the hell you talking to him for? He can't hear a fucking thing." Fucking serves no real lin-

guistic purpose here, except to add mild intensity perhaps. It does establish, as do subsequent vocalizations in the film, that those who are judged insane and those who are judged sane all use the same vocabulary in the same way.

When McMurphy stages a wild party on the ward one night,

the noise attracts the night supervisor. The revelers panic

as they hear footsteps approaching, and they scramble into the office to hide. Someone asks where the guard is and what he is doing. The guard replies, "I'm doing the same fucking thing you're doing-hiding." Ten times the word occurs in Cuckoo as a casual adjectival modifier.

After observing the great variety of ways in which fuck is used, one concludes that its clandestine status has led to no open modeling of usage, no prescribed structure, and therefore a great many different styles of usage have developed.

When a word is not used in one particular way, it may become used in all ways. When open communication does not exist, small clusters of people communicate among themselves and may develop idiosyncratic ways of using a term.

Perhaps the quintessence of the confusion represented by fuck is demonstrated in Shampoo by George's statement, 173

"Women are always complaining about how some guy fucked 'em over." This example is classified as mixed usage since it does not clearly fall under symbolic or non-symbolic. It occurs toward the end of the film. George has been discovered in the act of sexual intercourse with his previous girlfriend, Jackie. This leads to the dissolution of his relationship with Jill, his present girlfriend. Returning home to his apartment, he finds Lester, Jackie's present male companion, waiting for him. Lester is seeking revenge, obviously, since he is accompanied by two muscle men, the stereotype of thugs hired to inflict physical beating on someone. However, George distracts Lester from his original intent and engages him in discussion. They talk about Jackie, about Felicia, about her daughter, and then about women in general. George tells Lester that he listens to women all day long in the beauty parlor and "Women are always complaining about how some guy fucked 'em over." "Face it," George says. "We're always trying to nail them and they know it. Theydon't like it. They like it and they don't like it." George declares here that women are ambivalent, but in truth, he is ambivalent. What does he mean by the sentence, "Women are always complaining about how some guy fucked 'em over"? Is the reference to sexual ineptness or to being taken advantage of sexually? Or is the usage metaphoric? Or both? Why is the sexual act even one of the linguistic options for a negative metaphor? On the one hand, George likes to fuck because the women are so appealing. It 174

makes him feel as though he's going to live forever. On the other hand, when he describes his own inadequacies, he says he is a fuck up. A "fuck-up" is certainly something he has

been, literally, and has enjoyed being; but a fuck-up will

also serve as an apology for his behavior and as a term of

self-degradation. Does George's mixed-up use of fuck reflect

his mixed-up concepts of sex? I believe all the evidence says that it does. George's usage swings between symbolic and non-

symbolic. When he says fuck symbolically, the context always

indicates a favorable attitude toward the referent. When he

uses the term non-symbolically, he evidences hostility. He

never once pronounces fuck in a casual, non-emotional way. George's use of fuck is compared below with McMurphy's:

George McMurphy

Symbolic 3 0 Non-symbolic Emotional: Anger 2 4 Emotional: Annoyance 0 2 Casual 0 8 Mixed 1 0

Does this linguistic use of fuck reflect in any accurate way the attitudes George and McMurphy hold toward the referent?

George defies the community code of conduct, certainly, by his promiscuity. However, he also condemns himself for his frequent sexual exploits. He has been indoctrinated into society's value system and has accepted it, at least to the extent that he keeps his involvements secret. He does not tell Jill of his other relationships, either because he himself feels they are wrong or because he knows Jill will condemn 175

them. George is aware that he likes women, lots of different

women, and wants to engage them in sexual intercourse. He

also thinks that the "right" thing to do is to marry, have

a baby, and settle down, as evidenced by his proposal to

Jackie after he has been frightened by the contemplation of

death. George does not agree with all of society's values,

but it does not occur to him to reject them either. He is

not naturally suited to getting ahead in the business world;

however, he keeps pursuing that goal, accepting the values

that other people put on "success." George is caught between

the cultural pattern and his own inclinations, but his reac-

tion is one of helplessness. He does not feel it is within

his power to define his own environment. In this respect,

George's mixed-up use of fuck reflects very accurately his

sexual confusion. On the one hand, fucking is positive and pleasurable; on the other hand, fucking involves "trying to nail" women and always ends in nothing. Sagarin said that the word fuck is "hated, feared, revered and loved. . .114

This polarity accurately describes George's feelings toward both the word and its symbolic referent.

McMurphy represents rejection of the establishment, just as his preponderantly casual use of fuck represents rejection of the linguistic code. He uses fuck as he wishes, creating for it new meaning which often becomes no meaning. In pronouncing fuck casually, McMurphy ignores a time-honored verbal taboo and says to society that he will make his own decisions 176

about words. He echoes Humpty-Dumpty who said, "When I use

a word, it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more

norless." By constant repetition of fucking as an adjective

to modify anything and everything, McMurphy sends a message

to the viewing audience that says, "Look at your silly word now. What was so magical, so terrifying about that word?"

However, McMurphy is a purist neither in his usage nor in his personality. He finds he cannot totally ignore society be-

cause society will not ignore him. In Cuckoo his compassion

for Billy engages him and aloofness vanishes. When Billy is driven to suicide, McMurphy physically attacks Nurse Ratched, the person responsible, and nearly succeeds in killing her.

McMurphy thus displays full-fledged anger toward the societal system as well as casual rejection of it, and one might draw some parallels between this vacillation in attitude and his varying use of fuck. When McMurphy is playing "his game," demonstrating a cool style that holds derision for established hierarchy (such as during' the fantasy baseball game), he uses fucking casually, frequently, and playfully. When his anger begins to surface, such as when Harding refuses to share his cigarette with Cheswick, hostile pronunciation of fuck occurs.

"It's a fucking lie" McMurphy says in denouncement of Harding's claim that he has no cigarettes remaining. This accusation is inverted taboo and does not represent rejection of the power of fuck as do so many of McMurphy's other vocalizations.

McMurphy's use of fuck indicates his attitude toward verbal taboo more than toward the referent of sexual intercourse. 177

The part of McMurphy that successfully rejects the established societal system also successfully rejects the linguistic code; from this part of McMurphy issue the casual pronunciations of fuck. The part of McMurphy that remains in touch and en- tangled with the community also perpetuates the traditional taboos of the language, though by use of inverted taboo rather than by observance of the taboo; from this part of McMurphy come the emotional and negative pronunciations of fuck.

With respect to reducing the taboo status of fuck, two different language strategies are demonstrated in Shampoo and

Cuckoo. In Shampoo, the word is spoken unemotionally with its literal meaning; this represents Read's formula for breaking taboos. In Cuckoo, the strategy of sound repetition is employed; fucking occurs over and over again until the listener no longer responds in shock when it is vocalized. However, neither of these strategies is employed consistently throughout either film, leading one to conclude that the filmmaker's first objective was not to be didactic. Instead, the primary goal was accurate characterization. I believe the filmmakers of Shampoo and Cuckoo were acutely aware of word usage and in full cognizance of language principles; they deliberately intended the mixed used of fuck to reflect accurately the sexual and sociological confusion in the heroes of both films. This represents beautifulcraftsmanship--making word choices from a conscious examination of verbal taboo and its full communicative impact. 178

Is fuck still a taboo term today? One must answer af- firmatively since it does not once occur in the "PG" film, Jaws. On the other hand, examination of its functioning in

Shampoo and Cuckoo definitely points in the direction of less stigmatization than in the past. The twenty examples of inverted taboo substantiate that the term is still clandestine. However, the six symbolic pronunciations and the ten times fuck is spoken casually indicate that a battle is being waged over its status, but that opponents of taboo are pulling in different directions. One group wants the term to become meaningful, and the other group wants it to become meaningless.

The final verdict is not in yet. If symbolic use increases, fuck may become an acceptable synonym for sexual intercourse.

If casual use increases, fuck may become totally divorced from its original referent and may take on a new role in American speech.

Obscenity--Ass

The word ass has facets which make it unique from the other words examined thus far. For one thing, there are two root words involved--ass and arse. Though both are pronounced as ass by speakers of American English, it is arse, meaning

"buttocks" or "rump" which is most frequently used in the vulgar sense. Until the second half of the seventeenth century the word arse was Standard English. Swift used the word in Battle of the Books in 1704. In his story, the spider says to the bee, "Do you think I have nothing else to do, in the 179

devil's name, but to mend and repair after your arse?"1 5 Ap-

parently, however, Swift was the last writer to give the word

in full until the year 1930 when Frederic Manning included it

in his war novel Her Privates We.1 6 The Shorter Oxford English

Dictionary on Historical Prin l indicated that arse is now

obsolete in polite use. Its history can be traced through

Middle English ars and ers, which came from Old English ears

and aers, and German arsch. The Indo-European root was orsos.

All these terms referred to "tail, rump, base of the spine, or

buttocks." The taboo of word undoubtedly derived from the

taboo of referent. The buttocks was not a polite part of the

body to discuss, again undoubtedly because of its connection with the bodily function of excretion and also the close connection with the sexual act.

Ass meaning "donkey," was asse in Middle English and assa

in Old English. The term is related to Old Irish assan, Latin

asinus, and Greek onos. The Indo-European root is apparently ons or ans. The symbolic referent of this word has always been "a quadruped of the horse kind, but smaller, with long ears." This symbolic usage was originallyappropriate and polite. In the King James version of the Bible, Jesus rode into the city of Jerusalem on an ass. However, the non-symbolic meaning of "an ignorant fellow, a conceited dolt," dates back at least as far as 1578.17 This meaning obviously developed because the animal was deemed dull and the animal trait then transferred to humans. We have done this with many animal 180

characteristics. We say a person is a rat, a lamb, a skunk,

a fox, or a cat, and the connotation is clear. Over the years,

the employment of ass to mean "blockhead" as an insult, affected

the symbolic reference to the animal. Or perhaps as the pro-

nunciation of arse changed to ass the two words became asso-

ciated in meaning by virtue of becoming homonyms. Through

one or both of these phenomena, ass accumulated enough stig-

matism that polite speakers began to refer to the animal as

donkey, and ass became taboo as a sound formation. Ass meaning

"donkey" does not meet the original definition of obscenity set out in this treatise since it does not pertain to sex, excretion nor to any part of the body involved in these two

functions. However, because the homonyms are confused in

the public's mind, this examination includes each instance

where the sound formation ass is spoken, though sometimes

the word root is arse, thus falling in the category of ob-

scenity, and sometimes it is ass, falling into the category of animal abuse, as defined by Vetter.1 8

The way ass is used in Jaws, Shampoo, and Cuckoo is highly varied and reflects the confusion of two referents

and a plurality of attitude toward those referents. It is

my suspicion that movie-goers are totally unaware of the

difference in referents when they hear ass in these films.

Ass turned out to be the most difficult to classify of the words examined in this thesis. Frequency of utterance is shown below: 181

Jaws Shampoo Cuckoo

4 9 8 All instances in Shampoo and Cuckoo refer to arse. In Jaws, two instances refer to arse and two to ass. I believe the speakers in the latter two examples are unaware of their referents and speak from habitual patterns rather than cognizance. Larry, the town mayor, says, "You're not going to do any half-assed autopsy on a fish!" This occurs early in the film. Fisherman from the island have come home with a shark they mistakingly believe to be the attacking shark.

The mood of the islanders is glee and elation. Their troubles are over, until oceanologist Hooper casts doubt on the identity of the shark and asks permission to conduct

an autopsy. Larry's reply to him seems to mean, "You're not going to do any dumb (ignorant, stupid) autopsy on a fish!" Such paraphrasing indicates that the referent is the

Middle English word asse and that the usage is non-symbolic and figurative. The other instance in Jaws sounds similar. Quint views all of Hooper's diving paraphernalia and asks, "What are you--some kind of half-assed astronaut?" The coupling of half with ass adds to the connotation of being

"inadequate, lacking, ignorant." I classified both these statements under ass. However, though the wording is alike in both, the later example half-assed modifies a person rather than an inanimate noun. Therefore, it is debatable whether the referent is ass or arse. Is Quint referring to an ignorant 182

astronaut or an anatomically incomplete astronaut? I believe the former but admit the possibility of the latter.

All other nineteen pronunciations of ass in the films

refer to arse, the buttocks or rump, the word known in Middle

English as ars and ers. However, variety abounds in the con-

notations of the word, Even in the two examples of symbolic

usage, ass functions differently. In Jaws, Hooper and Brody

are trying desperately to convince Larry, the mayor, that the

killer shark is still at large and is extremely dangerous.

They want the beaches closed. Larry wants them open for commercial reasons and denies the probability of danger. In

exasperation, Hooper says, "You're just going to ignore this problem until it swims up and bites you on the ass." The imagery is clear; the word functions as a pointer to the portion of anatomy that the fish will attack. The attitude expressed toward the referent may also be negative.

The other instance of symbolic usage involves sexual connotation and occurs in Shampoo. George and Jackie have left

Lester's election-night party and have drifted to a spirited party where, having wandered into the garden, they sit watching nude bathers in the distance. Jackie indicates that perhaps the revealed breasts of the bathers are attractive to George.

But then she says nostalgically, "That's right. You never were a tit man. You were always an ass and leg man." The connotation is obviously sexual; the ass is a part of the feminine anatomy with great appeal for George. The emotional 183

overtones are positive here. Jackie is admittedly intoxicated, but she is remembering previous good times with George in a sentimental, fond way. She enjoyed his appreciation of asses and legs. Here the word ass also functions as a pointer to the portion of anatomy intended, but the attitude expressed toward both the listener and the referent is positive. These are the only two clearly symbolic vocalization of ass, and each has a different emotional overtone. It is difficult to find uniformity in the way in which ass functions in Jaws, Shampoo, and Cuckoo.

Perhaps the most similar clustering of usage consists of the times that synecdoche occurs and ass is used to mean the entire person. This is done in every movie, six times in Cuckoo, once in Jaws, and once in Shampoo. Toward the end of Cuckoo, McMurphy stages a wild party on the ward floor. He bribes the night guard and smuggles into the hospital two women and a quantity of liquor. When the night guard discovers that the patients are partaking of the alcohol, he is dismayed and orders them back to bed. "Get your asses back in there," he shouts. "You're gonna get my ass really fired!" The night supervisor is aroused by the commotion and comes to investigate. During her inspection, the inmates hide inside the offices, but once she leaves, the guard again says to them, "Move you asses." He knows that he has brought calamity upon himself, and he tries in vain to get the ward settled down into bed again. All three of his vocalizations of *ass 184

constitute synecdoche; clearly the intended referent is the whole person. A similar use of ass is heard the following

morning when the daytime staff arrives at the hospital. Finding the ward in total disarray, Nurse Ratched calls on the daytime guards to herd the patients back to their quarters. One guard orders a patient, "Get your dead ass up there." Obviously, in these four instances, ass becomes an abbreviation, perhaps a negative description of the person involved.

Whether the connotation is always negative when ass is used as synecdoche is open to question. Shampoo's first

scene shows Felicia and George in bed together in George's

apartment. A phone call from Jill interrupts, and George

decides he must leave the apartment and take care of Jill's request for help. Felicia resents his departure, but as he

dresses, he says to her, "I want your ass in this bed when

I get back." Felicia does not react as though she were of-

fended by his address. She is obviously delighted to be

in his bed and seems to respond to his use of ass as though it were appropriately masculine and virile.

When Quint is about to embark on his shark hunt, he lets

flow a whole stream of taboo words, both profanity and ob-

scenity. He seems to be partly blowing off steam, partly

showing off in front of Brody's wife, partly reacting to Hooper's hunting paraphernalia, and partly just enjoying himself. He says, "Jesus H. Christ! . . . Son-of-a-bitch. . . 185

Goddamn women today! . . . Christ Almighty.. . . go to hell.

.. . When he sees the quantity of compressed gas that

Hooper brings on board, he says, "Thattll blow your ass right out the window on the side! Jesus H. Christ! Nowadays kids take out everything." This pronunciation of ass is another example of synecdoche.

McMurphy uses ass in this manner but makes it into a compound word--asshole. He is attending a session of group therapy when discussion turns to voluntary commitment in the hospital. McMurphy is absolutely astonished to learn that a large percent of the men on the ward are there voluntarily. In bewilderment, he says to them, "Jesus Christ.

You're no crazier than the average asshole walking around on the street." The use of hole to substitute for anus dates back to the fourteenth century, and the combination arse-hole has been known since the nineteenth century.1 9

It is definitely a dysphemistic term; there are no euphemisms for the anus in the English language.20 McMurphy's choice of asshole in this instance reveals not so much his attitude toward his fellow patients who are listening, but instead it reveals his rather low esteem for the average man on the street. The full meaning of his word choice is subtle rather than blatant, since when he is talking, his tone does not convey hostility so much as astonishment.

His surface message seems to be one of support to his fellow patients. He tells them they really are not crazy. 186

However, the secondary and perhaps the more important message

is that the rest of the world is truly crazy, crazy and des-

picable, if asshole is used dysphemistically by McMurphy.

The last example of synecdoche involves dsypehmistic

use of the compound asshole also. The word is spoken by the

inmate Taber to express his extremely low esteem for another

patient, Harding. In a group therapy session, Nurse Ratched

is pursuing a discussion of the sexual relationship between

Harding and his wife. Harding's linguistic style is verbose,

abstract, and ambiguous. It bothers Taber a great deal, and

the two trade several exchanges of verbal insults. Taber says

in great hostility, "I think you're some kind of morbid asshole

-- always talking about your wife--all the things that went wrong. . . ." It is difficult to decide whether the emphasis in this combination is on morbid or on asshole or on both.

In categorizing this example as synecdoche, I am focusing on the meaning, "morbid person." But more is involved emo- tively than this. The combination of morbid and asshole has synergistically negative impact. Asshole is not merely synecdoche. It is not only an abbreviation for the whole person, but it carries at the same time a connotation of extremely low esteem for that total person.

These eight instances of synecdoche are difficult to classify precisely as either symbolic or non-symbolic. They seem to fall somewhere between. They are not symbolic since the buttocks are not the exact referent. However, they are 187

not totally non-symbolic either since the buttocks are part of the referential meaning--the buttocks as well as the rest of the person's anatomy.

Ass does not classify neatly. Instead of falling into

polarized categories, it seems to run the gamut, displaying

degrees of symbolism and degrees of emotive functioning. For

instance, in Cuckoo, McMurphy brags about his fantasy of con-

quering Nurse Ratched and promises to "put a bug so far up her ass she won't know whether to shit or wind her wristwatch." In this sentence is ass symbolic or non-symbolic?

The scenario is the hospital ward: McMurphy is new and cocky about his prowess, confident of his ability to deal with the cold woman in charge. He is making a bid for leadership of the men on the ward and has just been challenged by Harding, a very intelligent inmate who asks him, "Well, lover boy, why didn't you tell her to go fuck herself?" McMurphy reas- sures the men that even though he did not confront Nurse

Ratched right then, he has definite plans for the future.

Within a week, he boasts, he will be able to "put a bug so far up her ass she won't know whether to shit or wind her wristwatch." Sexual virility is definitely part of the environment of this discussion. Lover boy, fuck, and ass have all been part of the conversation. McMurphy's boast is figurative in the sense that he means he will be able to "get the upper hand" with Nurse Ratched, gain her favor and thereby be able to obtain what he desires for the ward. But his 188

boast has symbolic overtones also. At one point only the camera communicates the message. Evening has come to the ward; darkness descends. Nurse Ratched locks up the offices and prepares to leave. Close-up shots show McMurphy watching her very carefully and show her awareness of him as she walks by in close proximity. The message is nonverbal, but it speaks clearly of physical awareness between the two. Other close-up shots of Ratched and McMurphy during group therapy sessions have the same effect of informing the audience that they are aware of each other. I think all the contextual

evidence says that McMurphy is speaking partly symbolically in this statement. He really wishes to become close enough physically to Ratched to have access to all parts of her anatomy, which conquering would make possible, in a figurative way, the vulgarism of which he boasts. Another instance of ass which does not lend itself to precise classification as either symbolic or non-symbolic is found in Shampoo. George says to Norman during an argument, "You can shove it right up your ass, Norman." This is obviously less symbolic than the examples of synecdoche discussed and perhaps less symbolic than McMurphy's utterance just analyzed, but still the symbolic referent is closer to conscious level than with other taboo terms when they are used non-symbolically. The phrase, "shove it up your ass" is such an action phrase; it is difficult to avoid the imagery of the symbolic referent, even though one is aware 189

that literal meaning is not intended. The scene occurs in the beauty shop while Norman is delivering a lecture to George, reprimanding him for his lack of punctuality and reliability. During the short episode, the two men exchange verbal insults and call on numerous taboo words to aid them. Norman says, "Horseshit!" and "You're going to end up without a pot to pee in." George retaliates with, "Fuck," "Oh, shit!" and "You can shove it right up your ass." The onus on ass as used in this expression may come from con- ceptualizing the discomfort involved in anything of bulk being inserted in that part of the anatomy, as well as, and in addition to, the cultural conditioning which teaches that the buttocks are an embarrassing part of our body, not to be bared and not to be discussed. Psychiatrist Rollo May, in writing about symbols, explained that a symbol is more powerful than a denotative description because it can speak from the past as well as from the present, from the unconscious as well as from the conscious.21 It seems that his explanation of the power inherent in symbols might well be extended to verbal taboo also and would help explicate why a phrase such as "shove it up your ass" can carry such power to insult. May said that a person "is able to say in the symbol not only what is present in the situation with respect to his problems., but to speak in the same symbol from unconscious depth as well." 22 I.A. Richards explained that the context of a word involves not only the present environment in which it is spoken 190

but all of the past environments in which the communicators

have had association with the word clear back to birth.2 3

When we deem these non-symbolic or half-symbolic uses of

ass as negative in connotation, we must be revealing some-

thing about our past associations with the term.

In Shampoo, Jill directs two sentences at George in

momentary irritation. "Stop kissing everyone's ass," she

says. "It just makes you a kiss-ass." She is annoyed that

George seems to be too busy to fit her into his schedule.

George apologizes and tries to defend himself by telling her he is only trying to get some money so he can start his own

shop and provide a stable life for her. Instead of softening,

Jill expresses her displeasure at the thought of George spending

all his time in supplication to higher powers. At this point

she tells him, "Stop kissing everyone's ass." Speakers of

American English understand that they should paraphrase Jill's

command, "Stop bowing and scraping before everyone," or "Stop

placating everyone." Nonetheless, the symbolic image is easily

called to mind, and the posture involved is humiliating,

perhaps unnatural, and certainly demeaning. The phrase "kiss

my foot" is a euphemistic development from "kiss my ass,"

and carries much the same connotation of meaning--one person

in extreme subjection to another. It is interesting to note,

however, which parts of the body are selected for honor and which for shame. Why is kissing the buttocks part of the anatomy shameful, but kissing the hand, the cheek or the lips 191

is not? The obvious answer is that the buttocks, by virtue of proximity, are associated with the bodily functions of excretion and sexual intercourse. It is, in truth, these functions which are so emotionally confusing and potent for Americans.

In Shampoo, George's complaint about his boss is, "I just want Norman to get off my ass." At first glance, this might appear to be synecdoche, but closer analysis shows that it is not. It is figurative or non-symbolic though easily confused, as are all the utterances of ass. George is talking with Jill when he makes this statement, sharing with her the troubles he is having with-his boss. George does not wish Norman to get off his physical person but to stop bothering him. This differs from the instances of synecdoche where the physical body of the person is the object of the abbreviation ass. This is the first example of ass that seems clearly and totally non-symbolic. Lester's declaration that someone is "a pain in the ass" also seems non-symbolic. Lester is talking with Jackie in his business office and refers to a third party when he uses this phrase, meaning that the person is a bother. One can conjecture that the figurative "pain in the ass" developed from an earlier literal use describing the result of one person having kicked another in the buttocks. Because of the onus on the word ass, the euphemistic phrase "a pain in the neck" developed and functions in similar fashion in American 192

English, indicating that something or someone is irritating to the speaker.

Ass is used once without any denotative meaning at all. It functions simply as an exclamation. This occurs toward the end of Cuckoo in the party scene. During this episode the night guard, Turkle, uses ass as synecdoche three times, and he says it a fourth time as an interjection. Turkle is upset when he discovers the patients on the ward are out of their beds and absorbing huge quantities of liquor. "Ain't this a bitch!" he exclaims. "My ass! This ain't no night- club! Get back in bed!" Ass is totally non-symbolic here. The entire purpose of the statement is emotive and in no way referential. It is easier to classify this example than most of the vocalizations of ass in these films.

The most hostile pronunciation of ass occurs in Shampoo and is voiced by George when he is angry with the banker who refuses to lend him money, money which would enable him to open his own beauty parlor. George is in unfamiliar

territory in a bank. Dealing with females is something at which he excels. But in the bank he is confronting a man. Furthermore, the banker does not seem to have a high opinion of male hairdressers. George quickly perceives that he has no status in the banker's eyes, and he begins to seethe at the injustice of the subordinate role he must play. When it is finally apparent that the banker does not intend to lend him any money, George explodes in anger. 193

"You asshole!" he says to the banker and marches out of the building. Obviously asshole is a derogatory term. Why is this word suitable for insult? The answer can only lie in the emotional meaning with which the symbolic referent has been endowed. Asshole here represents inverted taboo, and

as in the cases of angry pronunciation of Jesus, God, and

fuck, the term can only serve its purpose of insult if the

speaker has acceded power to it. With ass, the power comes

because a speaker endorses the cultural belief that the but-

tocks are a shameful part of human anatomy. This endorsement may be conscious or unconscious, but it is the foundational premise which caused the word ass to become taboo and which now provides its power to insult. If one speaker said to another, "You nose!" or "You hand!" no meaning would be communicated. These parts of the body have not acquired stigma.

When George calls the banker an asshole, is synecdoche involved as well as inverted taboo? Perhaps so, though in a peculiar way. As George hurls this epithet at the banker, it is as though he has reduced and compressed the entire essence of the banker to that one part of his anatony which is so repulsive. The sum total of his personality amounts to no more than that one part of his anatomy. In this rather figurative way, synecdoche does operate in George's statement.

The last example of ass in these three films presents something unique in thatit is a nonsense word. At the very beginning of Shampoo, George is in bed with Felicia in his 194

apartment when Jill calls on the telephone. George decides

he must answer Jill's call for help, and he begins to explain

the dilemma to Felicia. He tells Felicia that a friend of

his is really in trouble and mumbles something about her

stomach. Felicia latches on to one of the words he is mut- tering and asks, "Pancreas? Is it her pancreas?" "Yeah, that's it," says George. "It's her pancreass," and he

changes the inflection in his voice in order to accent the

last syllable slightly more than did Felicia in her pronun-

ciations. It is an obvious play on words. A moment later

George says, "I want yourass in this bed when I get back."

The connection between the two seems obvious. However, this

connection is never stated in the film. Nor is there any in-

dication on screen that Felicia has understood his word pun

on pancreas. It is as though the pun is for George's own private amusement and perhaps for those viewers who are quick enough to catch this word from amidst his mumbling. Why does George pun on this word? Jackie accuses him later on in the film of always having had an absorbing interest in

"asses and legs." Is he so preoccupied with these subjects that when he hears the sound formation pancreas he cannot help but hear ass in the word? It is true to George's nature to believe that this is probable. It also seems reasonable to conjecture that he connects ass with Jill's ass since she has just telephoned and asked him to come to her apartment.

George knows this will result in sexual intercourse. Though 195 ass is never overtly employed in Jaws, Shampoo, or Cuckoo to refer to the sexual act (as in "a piece of ass"), it may well be this context that enters George's mind at this particular point. He is rather amused to label Jill's problem as her pancreass. Ass is connected with sex in his mind. Jill's problem truly is a sexual one, and he is going to solve it.

He has been almost truthful in telling Felicia that Jill's ailment is her pancreass.

What can be said in conclusion about ass is that it is used today in linguistic confusion rather than clarity. There is confusion between the two root words, arse and ass, since today they are homonyms, and with arse there is confusion between symbolic and non-symbolic usage. Ass used symbolically to point to the animal as referent, is not heard often since the taboo of sound formation has been strong historically and contemporary speakers of American English have grown up using donkey, jackass, or jenny instead. If ass were used symbolically, it would carry little stigma today among educated Americans.

Ass used non-symbolically is an insult and considered impolite.

Arse defies neatly packaged conclusions. When examining fuck,

I found it safe to generalize that symbolic employment of the term accompanied a positive attitude toward the referent and often toward the immediate audience. There are only two instances in Jaws, Shampoo, and Cuckoo where arse is definitely symbolic, and of these, one has positive connotations and one has negative connotations. The great majority of other 196

pronunciations are negative, and though the degree of emotion

varies, they would meet Read's definition of inverted taboo. Almost never is arse spoken casually when used non-symbolically

or half-symbolically. The closest to casual pronunciation

would be George's word pun on pancreas, or his wish to find

Felicia's ass still in his bed when he returned, or the night

guard's prophecy, "You're gonna get my ass really fired!"

The large number of instances of inverted taboo indicate

that arse is still one of our clandestine terms in American

English. However, it is less taboo than fuck, as proven by the vocalizations of the word which occur in the "PG" film, Jaws.

Conclus ions Conclusions about the use of obscenity in Jaws, Shampoo, and Cuckoo are several. First and most obvious, the obscene terms examined, fuck and ass, are not nearly so taboo as they have been in the past, else they would not have occurred on film sound tracks at all. Second, both of these words still carry considerable stigma in American English, though fuck has more onus than does ass.

The power, or onus, of a taboo word is derived originally from the attitude held toward the symbolic referent. If fuck and ass are both still clandestine terms, it means that sexual intercourse and human buttocks are still subjects which Ameri- cans do not discuss comfortably. Lodle found in doing research for his thesis that, "In the American culture the most vulgar 197

terms are associated with the degree of taboo upon the various sex acts. For example, since incest is highly prohibited in this culture, it is no surprise that one of the very most taboo words 2 4 is 'motherfucker.,,, The reason for motherfucker's being clandestine is understandable; we seem consistent, at least. We acknowledge and announce that we do not believe in incest; therefore, motherfucking is not an approved activity nor an approved word. But why fuck has been ostracized from decency for over three hundred years is still puzzling. We proclaim that we believe in the rightness, the purity, the naturalness of the act, and yet we reject the word that suc- cinctly describes it. Do our verbal taboos betray our true feelings? Perhaps novelist KatherineAnne Porter accurately represents the American public's views in the following defense of obscenity:

My contention is that obscenity is real, is necessary as expression, a safety valve against the almost intol- erable pressures and strains of relationship between men and women, and not only between men and women, but between any human being and his unmanageable world. we distort, If warp, abuse this language which is the seamy side of the noble language of religion and love, indeed the necessary defensive expression of insult sexual towards the partner and contempt and even hatred of the soluable in- stubborn mystery of sex itself which causes us such fleeting joy and such cureless suffering, we what have left for a way of expressing the luxury of obscenity which, for an enormous majority of men, by their testimony, ow is half the pleasure of the sexual act. Lodle's research showed that the use of sexual obscenities in a society could be correlated with that society's attitude toward sex. In societies where a repressive attitude toward sex prevails, words for sexual intercourse, for instance, are 198

used non-symbolically to express aggression. Such words "present themselves as a channel for venting non-sexually insti- gated aggression." 26 In addition to the United States, many other cultures substantiate this finding. On a small Malanesian island named Dobu, where an extremely repressive attitude toward sex prevails, aggressive terms referring to sexual intercourse produce such an intense reaction that at times only suicide can alleviate it.27 However, a repressive attitude toward sex was not found to be universal. For example, among the inhabitants of Lesu, sexual intercourse has only positive connotations and adultery is freely permitted. Correspondingly, no aggressive feelings can be vented through terms describing those acts. The few sexual restrictions in that particular society are toward incest and bestiality. "Similarly," Lodle said, "among the Trobriand Islanders there are very few sexual limitations and thus not many sexual expletives." 2 8 Thus, Katherine Porter's contention that "obscenity is real . . . indeed the necessary defensive expression of insult towards the sexual partner . . ." seems invalid, at least on a universal plane. Still speaking of obscene terminology, Porter advised, "We cannot and should not try to hallow these words because they are not hallowed and were never meant to be."29 Such a view of the way language works harkens back to early man who felt language was a direct gift from God and therefore not to be tampered with in any way. Chapter VI will deal further with our right to determine our own linguistic meanings. 199

It does seem to be true, however, based on an examination of fuck and ass in Jaws, Shampoo, and Cuckoo, that obscenities serve in American English as a means of venting hostility. It is further true that this is not the only way obscenities are used in American English. There are instances of symbolic usage, most of which accompany a positive attitude toward the referent, and there are instances of casual usage,

most of which totally divorce the referent from the sound formation. Such mixed and contradictory usage of both fuck

and ass supports an hypothesis that Americans are presently

confused in their ideas about sex and about the human body. Sagarin explained how ambivalent attitudes develop in our

culture. He was discussing attitudes toward the sex organs

of the body, in particular, but what he said can be applied

to attitudes toward sexual intercourse and toward the buttocks as part of our sexual anatomy:

Having been kept in deliberate ignorance, (about sex organs of the body) and having been subjected to lies and evasions, the child learns at an early age that the organs in question have names that are easy to say, well understood, and highly forbidden.

The child learns that in each phrase or word there is an emotionally-loaded characterization. The thing for which there is a special name is filthy, because the word itself is filthy. . . . The child is told: Don't use these words because they are dirty. The effort exerted at a later date by parents and society to explain that the objects for which these words stand are clean, but only the words themselves are dirty can have little impact upon the inculcated child.3 0

There is, instead, a high probability the child will inter- nalize his early teachings and from then on throughout his 200

life will experience what Read called "the fearful thrill" 31

in seeing, doing, or speaking the forbidden. The emotional

response is totally out of proportion to the simple semantic content of the word.

However, there are indications from the way fuck and ass

are used in Jaws, Shampoo, and Cuckoo, that a move is abroad

in our culture to resist the inculcating process described

above by Read and Sagarin. With fuck, in particular, one can

see two language strategies operating. There are those who,

along with D.H. Lawrence, would have us use fuck biologically and symbolically whenever we wish to refer to sexual intercourse. There are others whose goal is to strip the word fuck of its taboo status so that the sound formation no longer causes "the fearful thrill" in listeners. One strategy is content oriented; the other is sound oriented. One group cares about the referent and wishes to promote open, positive attitudes toward sexual intercourse. The other group wishes to rid the community of "word magic" once and for all. Both groups seem accurate reflections of American society right now--a culture where philosophies are in flux, mores in transition and where there is no universal acceptance of a single sexual code of conduct. NOTES 1 I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York, London: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 19, 23. 2Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 2nd ed. (New Yo1k:MacMillan, 1959), p. 239. 3 John Florio, A Worlde of Words or Most Copious, and Exact Dictionarie in Itallan and En lish (Lo5ndon: Arnold HatTe7d, 1598). Takeinfrom Queen Anna s New World of Words Revised in 1611 (Menston, Englan: Scholar~PTress LimlTeT,7968), p. 194. 4 Allen Walker Read, "An Obscenity Symbol," American Speech, 9 (1934), 270. 5 Edward Sagarin, The Anatomy of Di Words (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1962), pp.~~T36-737. ~~~ 6 Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction: Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America (New Jersey: Prentice- Hall,1T973), pp. 1T4~118~. 7 Steve E. Lodle, "Sexual and Excretory Vernacular: A Delineative Examination and Empirical Analysis of the Nature, Scope, and Function of Taboo, Inhibitory, Euphemistic, and Dsypehmistic Communication Paradigms," unpub. master's thesis (California State College, Long Beach, 1972). 8 Pauline Kael, New Yorker, February 17, 1975, 86-90.

9 See Chapter II, pp. 65-66.

1 0Lodle, p. 126.

llLodle, p. 126.

1 2 Sagarin, p. 143.

1 3 Sagarin, pp. 143-144.

1 4 Sagarin, p. 136.

1 5 Peter Fryer, Mrs. Grund : Studies in E__glish Prudr (London: Dennis Dobson, 1963 , p. 35. ~~ 1 6 Fryer, p. 35.

201 202

17Fryer, p. 36. 18Russell Foote and Jack Woodward, "A Preliminary tigation Inves- of Obscene Language," Journal of 'Psychology 83 (March 1973), 264. 19Fryer, p. 38. 20Fryer, p. 38. 2 1 Rollo May, 'ymbolism in Religion and Literature (New York: George BrazillTe7r, T96), p. 16.~ 22May, p. 16. 23 C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning Study of the Influence of Language~ oughtof Meaning: a d hofte Thouant o __ cienceht ismi (New~CTolrk: arcourt, race andCompany,

24Lodle, p. 35. 25Katherir Anne Porter, "A Wreath for the Gamekeeper," Encounter, 14 (February 1960), 72. 26Lodle, p. 35. 27Lodle, p. 35. 28Lodle, p. 36. 29Porter, p. 72. 30Sagarin, pp. 83-84. 31Read, p. 266. CHAPTER VI

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS In order to better understand the clandestine vernacular of American English, this thesis examined certain taboo words used in the current films Jaws, Shampoo, and Cuckoo. It now seems appropriate to evaluate the methodology employed, the medium selected, and the knowledge gleaned in this endeavor. Language theories of I.A. Richards and Alfred Korzybski formed the theoretical framework within which this study was conducted. The questions specified in Chapter II were applied to each instance of Jesus, God, fuck, or ass, and all significant answers are recorded and presented as part of this treatise. The methodology helped to make clear distinctions between symbolic and non-symbolic use of taboo terms and led to the conclusion that, in general, symbolic use is accompanied by positive attitudes while non-symbolic use, which occurs more frequently, is accompanied by negative or neutral attitudes. Analysis showed that casual verbalization of Jesus, God, fuck, and ass occurs less frequently than does emotional pronunciation in the form of inverted taboo. Such data indicates that all four words still carry considerable stigma in Ameri- can English, although the taboo is lessening because of (1) symbolic employment of terms, and (2) casual non-symbolic pronunciation.

203 204

In the case of profanity, casual non-symbolic pronuncia-

tion is leading to separation of the symbol from its referent.

God and Jesus take on a new function as interjectory terms

divorced from religious context, and the original spiritual

threat of the words carries less and less potency, partly be-

cause of this linguistic separation of symbol from referent.

The obscene words fuck and ass are gaining acceptability

because of both symbolic use and casual non-symbolic use. In

Shampoo and Cuckoo, fuck is used to designate the act of

sexual intercourse. Such usage decreases the stringency of

the taboo via a strategy described by linguist Allen Walker

Read, who recommended the unemotional, literal employment of

clandestine terms. The casual pronunciation of obscene words

in all three movies reduces the strength of the taboos via the process of sound repetition where the shock effect on listeners is lessened with each subsequent vocalization.

Language theories adapted from I.A. Richards made it possible to ascertain the speaker's intent and his attitude toward the audience when a taboo word was spoken. However, linguistic analysis alone was not sufficient in determining the speaker's attitude toward the referent. For example, when a character in the film uses the words, "Oh, God" in exclamation, he violates the pattern of reserving God exclusively for sacred denotation. However, one cannot draw from this a definite conclusion about the character's concepts of a deity named God. On the one hand, his profane use of God 205

may indicate a rejection of theism. On the other hand, it may indicate compartmentalized thinking in that he uses two homonyms: God for the Deity and god for swearing. Thus, the attitude of the speaker toward the referent was difficult to isolate by following I.A. Richards' methodology. When pronunciations were symbolic, the attitude seemed positive, but when pronunciations were non-symbolic, the attitude toward the referent was not determinable. It may be possible, however, to estimate attitude toward referent more accurately by looking at other factors in addition to linguistic performance. By examining the speaker's total life style, his

interpersonal relations, and his behavior throughout the entire film, one can gain awareness of his values. It is

then possible to see if the values are concomitant with

linguistic choices in the area of verbal taboo. For example, in Jaws, Brody, Quint, and Hooper all face imminent death, but not one of them evidences religious faith nor calls on

a deity for help. When Quint eventually is killed, neither

Brody nor Hooper associates his death with mystical concepts.

No prayers are said; no spiritual gestures are extended.

None of these men is deeply religious, it seems safe to conclude, and their use of Jesus and God throughout the film is in alignment with this fact. Not once do they use either term symbolically to refer to the person of Jesus or to the Deity. Their frequent profane use, therefore, probably indicates rejection or disregard of theism and Christianity, 206

though the rejection may be at a subconscious level. While this conclusion is impossible to draw on the basis of isolated non-symbolic pronunciations of Jesus and God, it seems reasonable after an empirical analysis of overall behavior. In the area of obscenity, it seems quite possible to affirm that the vocalization of fuck and ass is in harmony with the attitudes of the speakers toward the referents involved. The terms are sexual in nature and are used in Shampoo and Cuckoo in very mixed fashion. This appears to represent accurately the confused and varied attitudes toward sex demonstrated by the characters. Particularly in Shampoo, the use of fuck and ass is diversified; approximately half of the pronunciations are symbolic and half are non-symbolic, the former usually positive in tone and the later, negative. Such vacillation in language seems an appropriate extension of the fluctuation in sexual behavior portrayed in Shampoo. All major characters participate in illicit sex and alterantely approve and disapprove of their own behavior. They are at- tracted to what they are doing, yet they accept society's judgment that it is wrong and "dirty." Lester says about his girlfriend Jackie, "What the hell. She's just a whore anyway. I go over there, have a few drinks, get my gun off. What the hell." His statement is representative of the other characters' attitudes also. George doesn't understand why promiscuous sex is wrong since it "feels so good," but he meekly accepts Jill's reprimands, which represent societal 207

expectations and norms. The use of sexual words by these

characters seems to indicate their attitudes toward sexual

referents. Harmonious alignment between language and behavior

is also found in Cuckoo. The patients use fuck and ass as

inverted taboo, and their behavior in group therapy confirms

confusion in their ideas about sex. McMurphy, on the other

hand, uses fuck and ass casually more than emotionally, and

this too is appropriate to his personality and behavior. He

evidences a very casual attitude toward fucking, as proven

by his verbal descriptions and by the act of bringing together

Candy and Billy for the purpose of sexual intercourse. McMurphy

says by his actions that sex is a natural, biological drive which should be satisfied, without regrets or guilt. Such a

casual view is concomitant with casual pronunication of fuck and ass.

Use of the taboo terms Jesus, God, fuck, and ass generally appears to be in alignment with attitudes the speakers display toward the referents, though this is a field for further inquiry. There are other aspects of study, not within the original scope of this investigation, which are recommended for additional research in the area of taboo terminology.

These include the degree to which the speaker is aware of his clandestine word choices, the filmmaker's awareness, and the filmmaker's intent. These concepts are touched on only briefly and speculatively in this thesis.

The medium of film proved to be very productive for a language study. Nonverbal cues, intonation, and vocal intensity 208

may be more accurate aids in interpreting a speaker's intent

and attitude than are printed data. Although this thesis ap-

pears to be the first time that film has been used as the

medium in an investigation of clandestine language, the study

of language through film is highly recommended as a fertile

field for further investigation. Speaking of the accuracy

with which movies reflect the society for which they are made,

British critic I.C. Jarvie said, "Apart from anthropological

fieldwork, I know of nothing comparable from the point of view

of getting inside the skin of another society as viewing films made for the home market." 2 During his first visit to the

States, Jarvie was deeply impressed with "American cinema" and "its ability to portray every aspect of American society with almost clinical accuracy: from the urban, rural, and negro slums, through suburbia, to its highest social and political realms: American-film-men knew their society and put it on their screens. When I first visited America, I was staggered by how accurately it had been portrayed on the

American screen."3 It is this reflective property of film which makes it productive as a source of data for any study which seeks to examine cultural language patterns.

This thesis has not evaluated Jesus, God, fuck, and ass as "good words" or "bad words." The arguments for and against the verbal taboos of American English have already been cogently set forth by numerous linguists, sociologists, and psychologists. Those who favor the perpetuation of 209

our taboos argue, in essence, that clandestine words perform a

necessary function in the language; they serve as scapegoats,

ministering to man's deep-rooted need for symbols of the for-

bidden. Taboos, they contend, are a unifying factor among

English-speaking peoples and provide a cathartic method of emo-

tional release which is both healthy and normal.4 On the other

side of the argument are those who believe that our taboos,

our obscenties in particular, reflect cultural attitudes which

are repressive, warped, and unnatural. They claim that to iso-

late certain words and designate them as taboo debases natural

acts of sexual intercourse and bodily function, spreads unneces-

sary guilt in the community, and encourages the exhibitionist.

This treatise will not reiterate the positive and negative aspects of clandestine vernacular and does not take an evaluative position. Instead, concluding remarks will focus on language theory once again in quest of what verbal taboo reveals about our linguistic habits in general. It is suggested that the way we view forbidden terminology is a reflection of the way we view the entire process of language symbolization.

Whether we believe that words are possessed of inherent power and meaning, or whether we believe that words are man-made and exist for the sake of nonverbal realities, is revealed by our attitude toward profanity and obscenity.

"Don't take away my words," pleaded Lenny Bruce, America's most 'revolutionary "obscene-word" comic, as he faced one of the many judges before whom he stood in the last years of his career.6 210

Words became weapons to Lenny Bruce, and, as Vincent Canby

wrote, "to make them weapons there had to be a certain amount

of collusion on the part of Lenny and the people who were

out to put him away. They had to agree that words could hurt,

that they were dangerous."7 Canby went on to comment, "We

once used to think that ideas could be dangerous. Lenny

found--as did the demonstrators in Chicago in 1968--that words had replaced ideas."8 The public that was outraged by Lenny Bruce's four-letter and ten-letter words on stage, and the police who continually arrested him on charges of obscenity, and Lenny Bruce himself, all subscribed to a theory that words are powerful, dangerous, and almost magical.

The same philosophy was evidencedamong members of the

Dallas Motion Picture Classification Board, who in May of

1975 gave a "Suitable" rating to Horror High, in which a high school student cut off his teacher's arm with a paper cutter, but a "Not Suitable" rating to Paper Moon because in it a ten-year-old girl said a four-letter word.9 One member of the Dallas board, Mitchell Rasansky, revealed his own concepts about obscenity as he criticized fellow board members, saying, "The obscene language in one film, Aloha,

Bobby and Rose, was unbelievable. Every other word was a

4-letter word. Ten board members came to that screening and I couldn't believe it when four of them actually voted the film suitable with exceptions. There were no exceptions-- it was obscene. . . . I was awake all night worrying that four 211

of the members actually thoughtit was suitable. . . . If these are the morals of this board, I think we are going to have to 1 0 disband." When questioned further, Rasansky said he found

scenes of violence more palatable than "a string of 4-letter words." 1 Reverend Neldon L. Watson, another member of the same board, commented, "Decent people do not talk like that."1 2

These two board members believe that words are very powerful

and that one's acceptance or rejection of traditional meaning

reveals one's inner essence and moral character. Rasansky's

and Watson's statements indicate residual acceptance of "word

magic" concepts. They subscribe to what Richards called

the "Proper Meaning Superstition." "That is," Richards

explained, "the common belief that a word has a meaning of its own (ideally, only one) independent of and controlling

its use and the purpose for which it should be uttered." 1 3

Katherine Anne Porter revealed her support for this concept when she wrote an article criticizing Lady Chat- terley's Lover, "Our language is rich and full and I dare- say there is a word to express every shade of meaning and feeling a human being is capable of, if we are not too lazy to look for it; or if we do not substitute one word for another, such as calling a nasty word--meant to be a nasty, we need it that way--'pure,' and a pure word 'nasty.' This is an unpardonable tampering with definitions.,"14

The belief system illustrated by these examples, that language exists somehow as an entity in its own right, is 212

difficult to identify in people unless they volunteer to speak

to the subject. One's epistemology is not necessarily revealed

by the words one uses since the differentiating factor between opposing linguistic philosophies is whether a word choice is made cognizantly or whether it is made habitually because of

cultural assimilation of values. The words spoken may be the

same, but one speaker may know why he uses those words and the

other speaker may not believe he has an option. One person is

aware that he has given his consent to group norms; for the

sake of communicating, he has agreed that certain arbitrary

symbols will stand for certain realities. The other person

believes in a given array of symbols whose meanings have been

decreed and finalized; his task is to select from this word bank the "right words" and not the "wrong words."

Harry L. Weinberg spoke to this subject in the book he wrote explicating the semantic concepts of Alfred Korzybski.

"The verbal level," said Weinberg, "Operates in the final analysis for the sake of the non-verbal and not vice versa.

.0 . .When we recognize that words and classifications are man-made we gain tremendous flexibility in evaluation. Seeing them as man-made we feel free to change them. We become their masters instead of their slaves." 1 5 Psychiatrist Thomas

Szasz said the same thing a bit more caustically, "He who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other: he who defines thus dominates and lives; and he who is defined is subjugated. . . . In the animal kingdom, the rule is, 213

eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined."16

Szasz felt so strongly about the necessity for language aware-

ness because he believed that without it we are vulnerable

to the malevolent intent of demogogues. "To concepts like

suicide, homicide, and genocide, we should add Isemanticide'

--the murder of language." 1 7 By semanticide he meant the

misuse of symbolization through hidden metaphor and mysti-

fication. "Thus it is that the 'great'philosophers and

politicians whose aim was to control man, from Rousseau to

Stalin and Hitler, have preached and practiced semanticide;

whereas those who have tried to set man free to be his own master, from Emerson to Kraus and Orwell, have preached and practiced demystification of language." 1 8

Demystification, many would agree, is the primary aim

of all education, which seeks to move learned ideas into

awareness so that examination, evaluation, and reality testing can take place. The subsequently formed concepts, while in essence they may remain unchanged to the outside observer, become part of a mature philosophy elected by the individual rather than a learned philosophy accepted by him.

In like manner, if the words of profanity and obscenity become available to our conscious minds for analysis, we may then decide for ourselves whether we agree with the present taboos of American English and whether we wish to do anything about it. We might ask, as did D.H. Lawrence, "Tell me what's 214

wrong with words or with you, that the thing is all right but

the word is taboo?" 1 9 We might echo Professor Edward Hanford

Kelly, who extolled the perverse satisfaction of voicing aloud

certain obscenities. 2 0 We might decide that our own verbal

obscenities should be concomitant with the realities we deem

obscene in the world. Whatever the outcome, the choice is

ours; once we have examined our language codes, we may then

determine how we will employ them and can henceforth operate

from this more powerful position of awareness. Speaking of the British taboo word bloody, an Englishman wrote in 1920, "And here a horrid thought strikes us. Rob those who are wedded to this ugly word as their favorite intensive and they will have to have something to put in its place; what ever 2 1 will it bel,, If one subscribes to a theory of mastery over

language, one then has the right to choose for himself what it will be. NOTES 1 Allen Walker Read, "An Obscenity Symbol,"' American Speech 9 (1934), 277. 21.C. Jarvie, Movies and Society (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1970), pp. 137T38. ~ 3 Jarvie, pp. 137-138. 4 Joan Beck, "What we need are some new expletives," Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 12, 1975, p. 9-E, cols. 3-6. Edward Hanford Kelly, "A Bitch by Any Other Name is Less Poetic," in Aspects of American English, 2nded., Elizabeth M. Kerr and Ralph M. Aderman, eds. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1970), pp. 293-297.

Read, pp. 267, 276-277

Edward Sagarin, The Anatomy of Dirty Words (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1962), p. 109. ~~~

"The New Pornography," Time rev. in The American Language in the 1970s (San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser,~1974), p. 284. 5 Peter Farb, Word PLay (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974) pp. 83, 94.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scrib- ner's, 1929), p. 191.

D.H. Lawrence, Sex, Literature and Censorship, Harry T. Moore, ed. (New York: Twayne Publisher~ 1953).

Read, pp. 277-278. 6 Albert Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce! (New York: Random House, l974), p.702. 7 Vincent Canby, "Who Ever Thought Lenny Would Be Respect- able?" New York Times, December 1, 1974, Sec. D, p. 25, cols. 2-6.

8Canby, p. 25, col. 4. 9 Marylin Schwartz, "Classifying Film Often Ends Up Unsoothe- able," Dallas Morning News, May 4, 1975, Sec. A, p. 1, cols. 5-6. p. 15, Eols. 2-4.

215 216

10Schwartz, p. 1, col. 6.

1 1 Schwartz, p. 1, col. 6.

1 2 Schwartz, p. 1, col. 6. 1 3 1.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Pres&7 1936), p. 11. 14 Katherine Anne Porter, "A Wreath for the Gamekeeper," Encounter, 14 (February 1960), 72. 1 5 Harry L. Weinberg, Levels of Knowing and Existence: Studies in General Semantics (New~York Harper and Brothers, 1959), pp. 58, 67. 1 6 Thomas Szasz, "Language," in Language Awareness, Paul A. Eschholz, Alfred F. Rosa, and Virginia P. Clark, eds. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974), pp. 38-39. 1 7 Szasz, p. 1.

18 Szasz, P. 1. 1 9 Haig A. Bosmajian, "Obscenity and Protest," Today's Speech, 18, no. 1 (1971), 9.

2 0 Kelly, p. 296.

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