A rant.
My Husby and I like to swim.
It keeps us healthy and young.
Or at least healthy.
After a bit of rigorous paddling, we like to sit in the hot tub and visit.
Our local pool facility inevitably has music playing.
Yesterday, shortly after we got in, a catchy tune started.
Catchy.
I started to listen.
The chorus came on.
The background music quit, just as the last line was sung.
A last line that consisted of the words, “What the ****!”
The words were painfully clear.
I looked around at the small children playing near us.
Children to whom the words were just as clear.
“Did you hear that?” I asked my Husby.
He didn't.
The chorus came on a second time.
“What the ****!”
“I can't believe what I'm hearing!” I crawled out of the pool and marched, dripping wet, into the front office.
The song wasn't as loud here, but still discernible.
“Can you guys hear that song?” I demanded.
The two women at the front counter frowned. “I wasn't listening,” one said.
“It's foul!” I said. “And there are little children out there listening to it!”
“Oh, my! We'll change it!” she said.
And she hurriedly did so.
They hadn't chosen the song. They had merely turned on one of the satellite radio stations, thinking that it would have a modicum of decency.
They were obviously wrong.
The experience reminded me of the time, a few months ago, when my Husby and I were eating breakfast at a local 'family' fast-food restaurant.
A young woman a few tables over was talking loudly on her cell phone to her boyfriend.
Or I'm assuming it was her boyfriend.
Some of the one-sided conversation would suggest it . . .
“You're the worst ****ing boyfriend I've ever had!” she said. “What are you ****ing talking about? I can't believe you would ****ing say that to me! How could you ****ing do that to me? Well **** to you too!”
And so the conversation went.
For nearly twenty minutes.
There were families there.
Trying to eat.
Most hurried their children through their meal and packed up and left.
And still, the girl shouted obscenities into her phone.
It turned my stomach.
Finally, we packed up what was left of our breakfast and escaped.
Finding somewhere better to finish.
Thinking of that girl and that song, I can't help but wonder . . .
Have we lost our gentility?
My Dad taught me when I was growing up, that what came out of a person's mouth was a direct reflection of what was going on in that person's brain. That a person who resorted to obscenities in their conversation simply didn't have the intelligence to converse on a higher plain.
I think of a speech given by a woman named Margaret D. Nadauld:
“The world has enough women who are tough; we need women who are tender. There are enough women who are coarse; we need women who are kind. There are enough women who are rude; we need women who are refined.”
We can easily substitute the word 'people' for the word 'woman'.
Have we been concentrating so hard on being tough and independent that we have lost our ability to talk on an intelligent level?
Is this really how we want to be heard expressing ourselves today?
Is that how we want our music, our movies, our conversations, our lives to sound?
Is that how we want our music, our movies, our conversations, our lives to sound?
And, for goodness sake, can't we think of another word?!
What are your thoughts?
The "F" word (among others we used to call by their first letters if we dared refer to them at all) has become almost an ordinary word. It's even in book titles (so far, with an asterisk instead of a "U" but maybe not for long. )I hear you. I'm beginning to see why some elderly people get to feeling they've lived too long. Not all change is good, and I fear we have totally lost civility. Those children whose ears you were trying to protect, sadly, may have already heard it hundreds of times. And it's invisible to their parents, a couple of whom may have been the desk people at the swimming facility. I have no good answer, except eventually we will have a new word with the power of the old word, and that will become the forbidden word. And the word you heard will just become ho-hum, but never to many members of our generation.
ReplyDeleteI have to admit that I swear quite a bit, but there is such a think as self control and public decorum. I respect both, more people should. And I believe, no matter what the words, that people who need to take phone calls in restaurants (it could be a babysitter, so I get it), should answer, say "hold one minute," and walk outside to talk. Decorum.
ReplyDeleteSo true. Children are exposed to a much coarser society than we were. It also drives me crazy to see young children sitting in front of violent, f-bomb laden movies. So sad.
ReplyDeleteI do swear. But am very careful where...
ReplyDeleteI have to admit I have started to swear at times, when life feels truly awful with an edge of anger. It's generally when my mother's behavior is particularly challenging or I injure myself on a day that is already bad. I don't do it in front of anyone else, but I worry about becoming that little old lady with dementia who swears a blue streak in the nursing home ...
ReplyDeleteThis is becoming common and normal behavior, and i wish the staff at the restaurant could ask such people to please take those conversations outside. The staff are probably afraid to do so.
ReplyDeleteMy Nana taught me about saving those words for the rare occasion when you really need them. The whole family on that side was gathered at her home for Thanksgiving, and she was run ragged with six adults and six children in her tiny house with only one bathroom.
Papa got a wild idea that he wanted duck as well as turkey for the big meal. Thus in addition to having to coordinate the care and feeding of all these people, she had to add something to the menu because he just would not drop it.
Someone ran her to the store for all the last minute purchases (she never learned to drive), and when she came back she made sure Papa was in the kitchen as she unloaded the grocery bags, naming each item as she pulled it out and ending with, "And I got your f***ing duck, too!"
It was the first, last and only time that word ever came out of her mouth (the family didn't even know she knew that word). She saved it for the one time it mattered, and Papa learned not to push her to her limit ever again.
That word is used here too - yes in English - as a normal word. I hear it in the trains in normal conversation among the young ones - it sounds like the conversation in the phone you tell off and they're not even angry. I have tried to teach my children (and myself) that you can swear if you really, really mean it, or if it hurts enough. We swear a bit more often than Messymimi's Nana, but not in a constant stream.
ReplyDelete