oh, for fuck's sake.

[fox]

This article about the Growing Problem of kids who swear all the time has me scratching my head quite a bit.

I mean, I hear what they're saying about how elementary schools aren't the place for profanity, and blah blah blah.  But, first of all, are these (often youngish) teachers seriously looking us in the eye and saying they never made a concerted effort to curse up a blue streak when they were twelve?  It's a thing kids do, frankly, and yes, as much as I normally take the teachers' side in disagreements with the administration, YES, your principals and other administors DO have bigger fish to fry.  There are metal detectors in your schools for a reason, people, and in case you missed it there's federal education policy that cares less and less about you doing your job and more and more about your students correctly filling in bubble sheets, and if kids aren't learning things it's not because their brains are full of words you think they're too young to use.

JESUS.

Teach them, since you're teachers -- teach them about register, yeah?  There's language that's appropriate for this or that situation, and inappropriate language for the classroom isn't limited to profanity, after all.  For the love of god, if I had kids in school and you tried to suspend them for what they said (and what they said wasn't a threat of violence against a classmate or a teacher), fuck YEAH I'd be in there arguing with you about it, and you might not like my language either.  And I'm the child of public-school teachers, okay?  I'm one of the ones who's ON YOUR SIDE.

And secondly, here's this quote:

Horwich said constant use of profanity reveals a poor vocabulary, and O'Connor lamented the toll it is taking on the language.

"There are words virtually disappearing from our English language," O'Connor said.  "When people are mad, what do they say?  They say they are pissed off or [expletive] pissed off.  No range.  There is a big difference between being upset or livid. There is a big difference between irritated and infuriated."

Yeah, and there's a big difference between whining and wanking, bonehead.  There are words disappearing from our language.  News flash:  THAT HAPPENS.  Words appear in the language, as well.  This is hardly, as I mentioned above, the first generation in which any of this has occurred.  GAH.  Maybe pull your heads out of your collective ass and recognize that the vitality of language is neither new nor the end of the world, and stop trying to make us believe that's your major concern in trying to get kids to clean up their language on the goddamn playground.

Comments

Oh, ferfuckessakes.

[the-emu.livejournal.com]

Suspension? Over words? If schools are hauling out the big guns for petty shite like this, what's left for bigger offences? What do you do to kids who cheat on exams or talk threateningly or steal or fight in the playground? It trivialises suspension. How serious can suspension be if Tommy got a couple of days off school just for saying 'fuck' a couple of times too many? This is like the junior logic to arguments for sending petty criminals to jail. Pulling children out of school needs to be a last resort.


But what *really* pisses me off is people disguising moral priggery as linguistics without an ounce of fucking logic.

Swearing is not a sign of a poor or limited vocabulary. By definition it is the person who chooses not to swear who has limited their vocabulary. One cannot get all snooty about the decay of the English language when one does not understand such basic English as that.

But then, in the same breath this guy complains that there's no range between 'pissed off' and 'fucking pissed off'. I hope he's not an English teacher, if he can't recognise that the application of 'fucking' as a dysphemic synonym for 'very' in this context both intensifies the adjective phrase and accentuates the social unacceptability of his mood, all while utilising harsh consonants for an acoustic emphasis on mood which is entirely lacking in all of the alternatives he provides.


Why do people insist on talking like swearing *just* got invented? Oh, yes, the English language was fine and pure until the young people of today came along! It hadn't changed a whit since Shakespeare's day and now... oh, no, wait... I seen to remember a few cunts and cocks in Shakespeare... shall we go back to Chaucer? And his dirty little rimming ditty?

Swearing doesn't take a toll on language. It is a natural part of the evolution of the language. Euphemism to dysphemism, dysphemism to everyday.

Words only have the power we give them. If you don't like a particular word, shrug it off and teach kids to love some better ones. But good luck convincing anyone that "I'm extremely livid!" carries as much raw power as "I'm fucking pissed as hell!"

8^-

Re: Oh, ferfuckessakes.

[emila-wan.livejournal.com]

You said it, Emu.

I don't see that much difference between "shit" and "shoot" or "Goddammit" and "Dad gumit" or "frickin" and "fuckin", etc. It's the thought that counts, right?

HOWEVER, I think 1) the schools have a right to set standards of behavior and enforce them, and 2) parents have a right to expect that their children's behavior and habits will not be totally corrupted simply by going to public school.

I do think suspension is going too far for a first offense. There should be an escalating scale of punishments for bad behavior. Also, the child's age and intent has to be taken into account. If a Kindergartener calls another child a "bitch," isn't it obvious she doesn't know what she's saying, other than it's a generic insult?

I am curious, though, why the issue seems to upset Fox so. *G*

Re: Oh, ferfuckessakes.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

totally corrupted simply by going to public school.

or any school. public schools operate in systems, which is why this article was about them in particular, with the teachers' appeals to the central administration and so on -- but it's not like kids at private schools don't curse and misbehave. it's just that such schools have less bureaucracy to deal with, so there's fewer places to try and place the blame.

I am curious, though, why the issue seems to upset Fox so.

one: because it really hacks me off when people get all custodial about language when it's plain from their comments that they don't have the first idea what they're talking about. this is, as you might guess, a source of daily annoyance for me, but most of the time i manage to control myself (after all, if it was going to seriously impact my life, i'd have been wiser to choose some other line of work -- MEMO TO PHARMACISTS -- but that's another story). :-) but reading this article, you know, straw, back, camel.

two: because there ARE just ENORMOUS problems with public education in the united states, and they need to be solved, and there are times when i'm left in tears just imagining the frustrations of being a teacher in a public school, and when your house is on fire it seems stupid to run an article in a major newspaper complaining that you can't agree on whose job it is to make someone straighten the picture frames on the wall in the third-floor hallway. NOT HELPING, is my point, and as detail-oriented as i am, man, do i get annoyed when people focus on minutia to the exclusion of the big picture.

the same day the "class struggle" column was about a school in prince george's county where all the fourth-grade teachers left at roughly the same time, in the middle of the school year, and kids weren't being taught science at all (though they were getting grades in science) because the school was busy preparing them for one of these utterly idiotic statewide standardized tests. now that's an article focusing on problems in schools. a whiny piece about kids using four-letter words diverts attention from the real point.