The Language We Speak

Last week I was in a high school teaching a class on etiquette in the work place.  One of the topics we covered was language, and how it is inappropriate to use foul language at work.  During the lesson, a student said something that shocked me.

Let's back up a bit.  For most of the last fifteen years I've been living in a bubble.  A bubble of good words.

I don't swear (usually).  My husband doesn't swear.  We don't allow our kids to swear.  None of our friends swear (at least not around us).  We don't have t.v. and we choose our movies carefully, so we don't get a lot of swearing from the media either.  I live in this beautiful little bubble where everyone around me uses nice words to talk to each other (or at least not swear words).

Often my kids would complain about all the swearing they hear on the school bus, and I'd think, "Sure, there's a few bad kids out there."  Occasionally my husband would complain about the men he works with and their foul mouths, but he was working with football coaches and referees, so that seemed only natural.  And in my mind, this language problem remained a series of very isolated circumstances.

And then I started working at the high school.

That was an eye opener.  It's not just a handful of bad kids.  It's very nearly every kid!  Even the sweetest-looking girls have the dirtiest mouths.  In over a year's time, I have never walked down the halls between classes and not heard the f-word at least once.  At least once (usually many more times) every single time I walk down the halls.  And not whispered either.  I thought, "These kids just need to be told that swearing isn't okay.  Then they'll stop."  Ha ha ha ha!  Isn't naivety so cute?  When I was a kid, swearing was something you did to try to sound cool or act rebellious.  Times have changed.   I soon uncovered a terrible truth that I never would have seen before leaving my safe little bubble.  These kids aren't swearing to be cool or rebellious.  They are swearing because that is the language they have been taught by their parents.  Our world is full of kids who are growing up with foul mouthed parents who not only swear in front of their kids, but they swear at their kids too!  Swearing isn't a sign of limited vocabulary.  Swearing is their vocabulary!  This is the way they've been taught to speak from the time they learned their first words.

I know right now a lot of you are thinking Duh!  But this was news to me.  Still, I remained safely in my bubble.  Yes there were bad parents out there, who taught their kids to use bad words, but if we just helped these kids to see that foul language isn't the norm, they would learn a better way.  They'll learn a better way than their parents taught them, and consequently live a better life.  Right?



Fast forward to last week.  I am sitting in a classroom full of teenagers discussing appropriate language in the work place.  I am explaining to them that in the grown-up world it is never appropriate to swear at work.  Then a student asks me a sincere question, "My boss swears all the time.  Everybody at work swears.  So should I swear to fit in?"

I admit, I was a little confused.  So I asked him to clarify.  Yes, his boss swears (a lot).  Yes, his boss is a real grown-up.  No, he isn't working at a construction site or on fishing boat.  He's working in a very public, customer service job.  Common sense tells me When in Rome...  He should try to fit in and act like his boss to make his boss happy.  But common sense and morality are at odds here (which doesn't happen often in my little bubble).

My little bubble of good words burst that day.  And I realized something that probably everybody else already knew.  Good language is dead in America.  We killed it.  Maybe not me.  Maybe not you.  But definitely us.  I don't know when it happened.  I don't know how I missed it.  It should have been obvious the day the vice president was caught dropping an f-bomb too close to a hot mic.

With this new knowledge has come new questions.
Does it matter?  I think so.  I think the words we use and the way we talk to each other matters.
If it does matter, is there anything we can do about it?  I don't know.  I used to think teaching my own kids to be respectful was good enough.  Then I went to work and felt like teaching my students to be respectful was good enough.  Now that I see the entire world is against us, I wonder if anything is good enough.

What do you think?  Does it matter?  Is there anything we can do about it?


Marcia