Thread: Inappropriate comments

Originally Posted by carlmaloschneider

I'd actually like to think that every part of this site would allow for discussions with friends in public. I feel that the whole site is a discussion with friends in public. Guess it depends on who you and your friends are and where their boundaries are. I myself have used the word 'shit' and feel it should be allowed, I wouldn't have a problem using that word in public. Even the 'F' word was used repeatedly on a 4PM AM Radio National ABC program (Phillip Adams) only a week or so ago. I believe there was a warning that the interview contained 'naughty words'. I wouldn't use the 'F' word here, not without cartoon like asterisks, hash symbols etc.

I think my point might be that we all may have completely different ideas about what language is appropriate, and a lot of that would be a cultural thing, and a demographic thing, etc, but we probably all know what topics would be off limits. Stephen Fry's 'Planet Words' series was excellent in the episode where it dealt with swearing...

In my 64 years on this planet there has been a definite coarsening of the culture. In the late '50s and early '60s comedian Lenny Bruce went to jail for using obscenity in his stage act. Twenty years later people were listening to Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy using the same language, or worse, and they were 'stars.'

I think it must depend on age, background ..... I was a street kid and used foul language from my early teens. OTOH, even in my young manhood, doing ironwork in an all male world, I did not use that language in front of children at all, or women who I was not intimate with. Certainly not in front of my mother or sister.

When I began going to AA meetings in the 1980s I was surprised, and offended, at the foul language routinely used in meetings in front of ladies. I couldn't be too offended though because it soon became apparent that the fairer sex used the same language in many cases.

Now I find myself working with three different men who are all 30 years old. So they grew up in the years when film and what have you loosed realism on society and they do not find it incongruous to use the 'F' word in front of men women, children. It is almost used by them as punctuation. Every other word. I don't think they could speak without it.

I find it sad that this is what the world has come to ...... at least the world I live in. I remember reading somewhere, many years ago, that obscenity and profanity ..... there is a difference ..... were used by people who lacked a vocabulary sufficient to express themselves. Anyway ..... the policy at SRP is to keep it clean. A little oasis in a polluted culture isn't a bad thing.