Sherry Chandler

I sort of cut my wisdom teeth on Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. Back in the early, early 70s, I even got away with teaching it in freshman comp. So having spent my life thinking that language should be demystified, I am somewhat bemused by the current tendencies toward a return to censorship. In many ways, by putting certain words in taboo, our current crop of Mrs. Grundys are increasing their power.

Poppysmatus has drawn my attention to this article in the NYTimes, “Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore“:

Incensed by what it sees as a virtual pandemic of verbal vulgarity issuing from the diverse likes of Howard Stern, Bono of U2 and Robert Novak, the United States Senate is poised to consider a bill that would sharply increase the penalty for obscenity on the air.

[...]

Yet researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing say that they have no idea what mystic model of linguistic gentility the critics might have in mind. Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, some variant on comedian George Carlin’s famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television.

[...]

Some researchers are so impressed by the depth and power of strong language that they are using it as a peephole into the architecture of the brain, as a means of probing the tangled, cryptic bonds between the newer, “higher” regions of the brain in charge of intellect, reason and planning, and the older, more “bestial” neural neighborhoods that give birth to our emotions.

Researchers point out that cursing is often an amalgam of raw, spontaneous feeling and targeted, gimlet-eyed cunning. When one person curses at another, they say, the curser rarely spews obscenities and insults at random, but rather will assess the object of his wrath, and adjust the content of the “uncontrollable” outburst accordingly.

And I will admit that much that passes for swearing these days offends my ears not because it’s lewd, rude, or crude, but because it’s unimaginative and boring. You want to see/hear some good cursing, read Chaucer or Shakespeare.

It’s a long article but a worthwhile read, perhaps, for us wordsmiths. And they do mention that an alternative title for “Much Ado About Nothing” is “Much Ado About an O Thing.” I’ll leave you to interpret that.

When Wordsworth, revising Milton, reconstructed the English sonnet into the epitome of the short meditative lyric, it seemed to provide an almost inevitable form for poems addressed to works of art. This may be partially due not only to the scale, but to the possibilities, in a sonnet’s interior structure, of developing rhetorical figurations of a whole range of visual elements in the object of a poem’s attention. The very visual format of a printed sonnet, picture-like rather than song-like or even page-like, may be of relevance here; and even in the case of Rossetti’s unvarying convention — influenced by the Italian — of carefully separating , in a stanza-like way, octave and sestet, the pattern is put to mimetic use: background/foreground, and image/interpretation are some of the oppositions paired across the divisions of the versification. From Washington Allston’s few fine sonnets on paintings, through Wordsworth’s and Rossetti’s, we can see the development of a sort of subgenre.

      — John Hollander in The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (The University of Chicago Press, 1995)

For Spring
by Sandro Botticelli
(in the Academia of Florence)

What masque of what old wind-withered New Year
          Honours this Lady? Flora, wanton-eyed
          For birth, and with all flowrets prankt and pied:
Aurora, Zephyrus, with mutual cheer
Of clasp and kiss: the Graces circling near,
          ‘Neath bower-linked arch of white arms glorified:
          And with those feathered feet which hovering glide
O’er Spring’s brief bloom, Hermes the harbinger.

Birth-bare, not death-bare yet, the young stems stand
          This Lady’s temple-columns: o’er her head
          Love wings his shaft. What mystery here to read
Of homage or of hope? And how command
          Dead Springs to answer? And how question here
          These mummers of that wind-withered New-Year?

— Dante Gabriel Rossetti