The Four-Letter Failure

As an unfortunate birthday approaches, my movie director friend Michael Mailer asked what wish I’m about to make: “Keira and Lily, I’d even give them up for Americans to stop using the F-word,” was my answer. Be it used as an adverb, noun, or verb, the F-word is now as ubiquitous as “hello” once was, proof that the barbarians have breached the gates and are now lords of the manor. 

Hollywood, of course, heads the mob of vulgarians, inserting the ghastly word in every script, dialogue, and speech. And the fools follow. As no one reads any more, the message is transmitted via screens, and repeated ad nauseam by the great unwashed. 

But I digress. It is not only the great unwashed, it’s everyone. And hearing a female voice uttering the horrid word on the street where I live in New York does manage to shock even an old-timer like myself. I used to hear the word long ago in downtown bars among young punks, but now it’s on Fifth and Park Avenues, where Wall Street types of both sexes flaunt it. (Ironically, few words engender contradiction more when uttered by the fairer sex than this dreaded one.)

The know-nothings that spout the F-word non-stop believe that it delivers an emotional impact that stuns the audience. Perhaps, but all it does to me is prove how tongue-tied modern technology has made us. Ironically but typically, the left uses the word far more than the right. But let’s go back to a gentler, better time, when beauty and elegance were appreciated more than vulgarity and ugliness. 

I am trilingual, now that I’ve forgotten the German that I spoke fluently as a child. English replaced it after I went to prep school in this country, and I also speak French and of course Greek. But English for me is the most wonderful of languages, the greatest gift that rainy depressing place has given the world. 

The Greeks have a word for beautiful words, phonaesthetics. An example of that is the word “enchantment,” the way one feels when meeting a beautiful girl. When I began writing for William Buckley’s organ, I surprised him by knowing words rarely used by common folk, words that sign language interpreters would get tennis elbow trying to transmit: such words as “bombilation,” the humming of bees; “prosopagnosia,” face blindness; and “psephology,” the study of data. My favorite was “batrachophobia,” an excessive fear of frogs. Most of the tongue-twisters came from the Greek, hence my brilliance. 

Yes, Greek does come in handy and adds to the beauty of the English language with words such as “diaphanous,” something that is light, delicate, translucent, or ethereal—whose meaning of something airy and delicate can also be applied to a young woman. With such appealing words, I often wonder how it is possible that now we only hear the F-word, striking with the monotony of a metronome. And it is not only the 18-to-24 know-nothing group; adults of both sexes think that they mesmerize by repeating it ad nauseam. Barbarism seems to have triumphed, and beautiful language and sonorous words have become like the Christians of yore, hiding in the catacombs of a select few clubs and houses. 

What a beautiful feeling one gets when reading, say, the careful, musical writing of an Irwin Shaw short story, his elegant, sonorous, guileful prose filled with poetic felicities. Or Papa Hemingway’s glorification of lunatic courage, or Fitzgerald’s ease and clarity that never require rereading a sentence in order to get the sense right. 

People write and speak in order to attain aesthetic enthusiasm. The perception of beauty is based on words and their right arrangement. Good prose and rhythm make the story. Literature distracts the reader from the real business of living; that is why good writers are rare and precious human beings. And that is why bad ones who make the world even uglier than it is already deserve to be cast down to the lowest level of Dante’s inferno. 

But back to the horrid word and its popularity. If profanity is a sign of authenticity, Beethoven was shot in Mexico and Our Lord Jesus Christ lived on the French Riviera. Our last two presidents have been F-word users in public, and it does not surprise me. As far as The Donald is concerned, you can take a Queens real-estate shark to the White House, but you cannot take the Queens real-estate ethic out of him. Past presidents never used it in public, including three great ones who were soldiers and would have been excused if they did: Jackson, Grant and Eisenhower.

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