A brief history of cursing in the media...

Written by Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/2-7-26

 

In the author's many, many years of toiling in the vineyards of newspaper journalism, there was one hard and fast rule: No bad words in print.   

Whew! F-bombs, bird flips, other vulgarities are rampant. What in the world is our world — America is our world, Minnesota too — coming to? In my many, many years of toiling in the vineyards of newspaper journalism, there was one hard and fast rule: No bad words in print.

Of course, many of us have been brought up on these vulgarities, which have more and more made it into the media. They were inescapable if you were born and raised in America in the last century or so. Maybe before that; I wasn’t there.

 

So last month when President Trump flipped a bird to a Detroit factory worker who’d loudly addressed him about the Epstein imbroglio, it marked the first time in American presidential history that it was employed at that level, on TV, for all the world to see.

 

Then when Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis loudly told ICE (we all know what ICE stands for now, and you don’t skate on it or drop it in cocktails) saying, “Get the” f-bomb “out of Minneapolis,” also on TV, it crossed another line in public discourse.

 

I have a long history with F-bombs and bird flipping. I am not unique. Every boy of my generation is/was intimately familiar with them, some employing them regularly, others following their Sunday School admonitions and holding back.

 

As a youth, I didn’t think girls even knew about such things, so it was only among male friends that I would engage in a bit of cursing in spite of what I’d been told in church. Never at home though. We weren’t a cursing family.

 

Still, if you have that kind of churchy background, you can’t help but feel it is a sin to swear. There’s a commandment that addresses it. It’s a chance most boys chose to take, although I have known a few who wouldn’t ever utter a cuss word. They are undoubtedly now in heaven or headed up that way.

 

I actually, and vividly, remember the day I learned the F-word. I was quite young, probably early elementary school age, when a neighbor kid (I could name him) and I were discussing swearing — you know the hells and damns and the S-word (still can’t use that one in print) — when my friend asked if I knew the worst swear word of all. I guess I admitted I didn’t, and he told me it was the F- word, using it. I was so young I didn’t even know what it meant, birds- and bees-wise

 

Followed by the perfectly acceptable word “you,” it was the standard remonstrance to someone insulting or threatening you. Some reports have said Trump also uttered that at the belligerent Ford factory worker. Of course he knows it; he’s almost 80 years old. No kid of that generation (earliest baby boomer), and those that followed, could escape it. Lamentably, I am of the late Silent Generation, just a tad older. We know it too. We’re not THAT silent…or old.

 

Moving on to the ubiquitous bird flipping throughout the same period of American life, I had a middle finger flipped at me just the other day while driving when another driver wrongly believed I didn’t properly take my turn at a four-way stop. Oh, well. He was too far away to see me stick out my tongue, so I didn’t bother. Childish.

 

An American boy was introduced to “giving the finger,” as it was often called, around the same time as he would pick up on the aforementioned swear words. It was rampant among boys when I was in junior high, although in winter it was thwarted by the wearing of mittens.

 

As Trump has shown, the flipped bird is still alive and well. But what seems to have disappeared is a gestured response, which was ubiquitous when I was a teen or thereabouts.

 

Some other kid would flip you a bird and, in response, you would signal a “same to you” sign involving raising the index and little fingers above a closed fist. Everybody knew it meant “same to you.” What happened after that would depend on how aggressive each kid was. Someone could get a bloody nose. I can write bloody here, but in merry old England it’s a pejorative comparable, but not equal to, our F bomb.

 

In my years of active journalism in Duluth, we considered this a “family newspaper.” It still is, but the family has changed, with a lot of help from the president and others, along with the Internet.

 

There was a time when the column I hope you just read wouldn’t be acceptable in a family newspaper. I’m a little uncomfortable reading it myself.

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.

Bombs in the news…

By Jim Heffernan

Bombs have been in the news a lot lately — the N-bomb, the F-bomb, Michael Moore’s Broadway show (bombed). Now the United States and North Korea are staring each other down over North Korea’s bomb plans.

In many, many decades of life, I have found that living is more tranquil when bombs are not in the news. I’m old enough to actually remember the dropping of the A-bomb on Japan, bringing World War II to an end.

The A-bomb (for Atomic) is the father of the N-bomb (Nuclear). Somewhere in there to further scare us are the H-bomb (hydrogen, stronger than the others) and another N-bomb (Neutron), which only kills people but leaves buildings standing. Drop a neutron bob on New York City, for example, and Trump Tower would remain standing. Not so much its inhabitants. 

I was 5 years old when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. News of it was everywhere, and even a child of kindergarten age understood that it was something terrible, frightening. I can recall my parents talking seriously about it at supper, ignoring the Lone Ranger on the kitchen radio in the background.

The whole idea of such a big bomb frightened me. And here’s how it manifested itself on one occasion: I was playing on our front porch when a huge bomb-like object suddenly appeared in the sky above western Duluth. It terrified me. I ran into the house screaming to my mother that the atomic bomb was coming.

She darted onto the porch and saw immediately what it really was: a blimp (a.k.a. dirigible). Not the Good Year blimp, just an ordinary blimp that looked an awful lot like a great big bomb. My mother allayed my fears, explaining that it was a harmless aircraft. Not to worry.

As time went by, the atomic bomb became kind of a fun thing for kids. One of the big breakfast cereal producers—General Mills, maybe Kellogg’s—offered kids an “Atomic Bomb Ring” for 25 cents and a box top from one of their cereals. I got one. It was an adjustable metal ring with a tiny plastic bomb on top. If you held the bomb close to your eye, inside the bomb you could see something like sparks flying. Wow.

Of course the threat of an atomic attack prompted the schools to add atomic bomb attack drills to fire drills. I learned later that some schools in the country had the kids “duck and cover” beneath their school desks. We just filed into the hall and stood facing the lockers lining the wall until the all clear. This was not nearly as much fun as a fire drill, which required us to file outside the school in orderly fashion and breathe the fresh air of a beautiful day. You could say atomic bomb drills bombed in comparison.

Oh yes, the F-bomb. Got to deliver on that. It was brought to the fore recently by short-lived White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci in an interview with a New Yorker magazine reporter during which Scaramucci dropped several F-bombs, shocking nearly everyone and probably resulting in the loss of his job after serving just 10 days.

But it opened the door to several media organizations, like the New York Times, to use the entire F-bomb word in reporting on Scaramucci’s diatribe. I was shocked. I remember the first time I ever saw the word in print: summer of 1963 reading Irving Wallace’s novel “The Carpetbaggers.”

It’s a word that was very familiar to teenage boys of my generation, and many generations before and after, but nobody ever wrote it down, for goodness sake. (Goodness had nothing to do with it.)

I had actually learned the word several years before. Right around the time the A-bomb was employed for the first time, I learned what is today referred to as the F-bomb stood for. A neighbor boy and I were in the alley next to my home (these things always happen in alleys) discussing various swear words and their seriousness. They were all bad, of course, but “hell” and “damn” didn’t seem like they would bar you from getting into heaven, should the occasion arise. A few others were more serious—you know what they are without my actually spelling them out.

Then my friend (we weren’t close, though) said he’d tell me the “worst” swear word of all. It was what we today refer to as the F-bomb. And he was right. It has endured as the worst swear word of all throughout the many, many decades of my life. Oops, we’re back to square one.

Editor's note:  We learned to "duck & cover" in the 50's.  Check out the video the Dept. of Education and civil Defense Dept. prepared for those of us growing up in that era HERE.