Crass is Crass

As I keep listening to The Better Angels of Our Nature, I have been fascinated by the devolution of violence, both historically and culturally. It’s a fascinating listen/read and I will again highly recommend it to anyone who has a curiosity like mine for sociological and cultural issues and trends that both explain aspects of our universe and help me understand why the world isn’t as genteel as I wish it were…or why maybe I’m wrong and its actually a lot better than I am giving it credit for. One of the terms that Steven Pinker, the author, uses a lot to describe the historically violent times gone by is that they are brutish. Brutish means resembling or characteristic of a brute — that is, cruel, savage, unthinking, or coarse in behavior or manner; lacking intelligence, sensitivity, or civilized restraint. It carries connotations of raw animal force without moral or intellectual refinement. With all due respect to Pinker, it really was Hobbes who famously used the term extensively in describing life in the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. The term comes from his Leviathan.

Because I am currently fixated on Hobbes and this concept, let me remind you that Leviathan is meant to be the sovereign state itself, which acts as an artificial “mortal god” created when individuals surrender their natural freedom to a central authority in exchange for security and order. The sovereign (whether a monarch or an assembly) holds absolute power, and citizens obey because the alternative — the “brutish” state of nature — is far worse. I am inclined to think that in today’s vernacular, its the 17th Century version of “Life sucks and then you die.” I wish everyone who is feeling that way could have a Hobbesian light bulb go on in their heads that tells them that the solution to life sucking might well be a better functioning collective or state. Of course, we are all shaped in our thinking by what goes on in our personal lives more so than anything we might read or hear, and the state is currently getting a bad rap. That’s probably somewhat because of inefficiencies that creep in with age and scale of any system, but I suspect it is also largely because of the increasing unaffordability of life and the role that taxes play in that equation.

One of the things that Pinker has turned to in his description of the brutish world mankind has suffered through over the millennia is that it is punctuated with a preponderance of crass language. Crass language refers to speech that is vulgar, crude, or coarse and it encompasses profanity, obscenity, slurs, and general “low” or offensive expression. Crass language generally falls into a few categories: profanity (invoking the sacred blasphemously…Praise the Lord!), obscenity (explicit sexual or bodily language…locker room talk), scatological terms (relating to excrement…who doesn’t like a good fart story?), ethnic/racial slurs (not going near that one), and general vulgarity (Grrrx#&*!). Linguists sometimes call these “taboo words”, terms that carry social prohibition regardless of literal meaning. The roots are surprisingly ancient and cross-cultural. Many have Anglo-Saxon origins. Many of English’s strongest curse words are Old English or Old Norse (Damn those Celts and Vikings!) in origin. But they can also be short, punchy Germanic words that were already considered low-register by the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066. When French-speaking Normans imposed their vocabulary on English, the older Germanic terms became associated with peasants and the uneducated, driving them further into “forbidden” territory. The irony is that some of the most taboo English words are among its oldest…go figure.

Words like “damn,” “hell,” and blasphemous expressions were originally powerful because of genuine theological fear, invoking divine punishment was not taken lightly. Their force has eroded with secularization, which is why stronger scatological and sexual terms have largely displaced them. Much of what gets labeled “crass” is inseparable from class. Elites have historically policed language as a marker of breeding and education. Kim used to tell son Thomas when he swore, “Are you gonna grow up to be a truck driver? Only truck drivers talk like that.” Of course, I would remind her that he might also grow up to be a Wall Street banker, since we all used to talk like that too… Nevertheless, “proper” speech was a gatekeeping mechanism, making vulgarity as much a social category as a linguistic one.

The printing press and literacy. As written language spread, authorities began regulating “obscene” print, giving crass language formal legal definition for the first time. But that all loosened in the 20th century. Broadcast standards, the counterculture of the 1960s–70s, and landmark legal cases (like FCC v. Pacifica, 1978) formalized ongoing battles over what language could appear in public. Profanity in mainstream media has expanded dramatically since. Just last night on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, I saw a bit on Prince Andrew and how his royal staff referred to him privately. It seems they called him “The Cunt”. Now that’s HBO and therefore cable, so its not what our friend Phillip would call “Public Broadcasting”, but its pretty much out there for everyone to hear. My the way, the word “Cunt” (which still makes me cringe to say), has a remarkably long and well-documented etymological history — it’s one of the more thoroughly traced taboo words in English. The word derives from Proto-Germanic (kuntō), with close cognates in Old Norse (kunta), Middle Dutch (conte), and Middle Low German (kunne). These were straightforward anatomical terms with no particular taboo status in their original contexts. They were simply the vernacular words for female genitalia. In Middle English it appeared without shame in medical texts, anatomical writing, and even place names. London had a “Gropecuntelane” (a street name documented in the 13th century, common in medieval cities). Chaucer used the word plainly in The Canterbury Tales, notably in the Miller’s Tale and the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, without it being considered especially shocking in context. The word’s transition to taboo status happened gradually from roughly the 15th–17th centuries onward, accelerating with print culture, religious influence on public morality, and the same class-based linguistic policing that drove other Anglo-Saxon terms underground. By the Victorian era it was essentially unprintable. In the United States it retains maximum shock value, arguably the single most taboo common word in American English. Brits are somehow less offended by it.

Linguistically, crass language serves real functions. It offers emotional release, in-group bonding, emphasis, humor, and shock. Studies by psychologists show that swearing activates different neural pathways than ordinary speech, which is why it can be oddly cathartic. It also evolves constantly: yesterday’s shocking term becomes tomorrow’s mild expletive as familiarity dulls the edge.

It never occurred to me to think scientifically about the connection between violence and crass language, but the connections run in several directions. It seems there is a shared neural architecture and it’s documented that profanity and aggression activate overlapping limbic system pathways, specifically the amygdala, which governs emotional threat responses. This is why swearing under stress feels physiologically satisfying. It’s a displacement behavior, a verbal strike rather than a physical one. Several studies suggest that access to strong language gives people a non-physical outlet for frustration and pain. But language is also a dominance signaling mechanism. Crass and threatening language functions as a dominance display, analogous to physical intimidation posturing in animals. Trash talk, insults, and obscenity-laced aggression are ways of establishing hierarchy without physical combat. Gang culture, military culture, contact sports, and prison environments all show this pattern clearly. The bottom line is that crass language and violence share deep emotional and neurological roots, can substitute for each other, but can also feed each other depending on context and intent.

You know where I’m going with this…yep, all roads lead to Trump these days with me and while Trump has always used crass and vulgar language that would have disqualified other political candidates, it seems to reinforce Trump’s image with his base. But he may have gone too far finally. Telling Iran to “Fucking open the Strait of Hormuz or I will obliterate you” may have crossed a line of decency with enough people both around the world and in the U.S. that he has moved from the locker room to the Tourettes Ward of the sanitarium. Crass is just…fucking crass.