Somewhere in C.S. Lewis, he was writing about how colorful the Elizabethans were, and he said that this was a gift that the English had apparently bequeathed to their American cousins. I think there is something to this, and perhaps it will help us to understand shoot cussing, slang, and other related . . . what’s the plural of flamboyance?
There is a long American tradition of this, probably beginning with Benjamin Franklin, often called the “first American.” I am speaking of a cultural and literary tradition here, and not about morals or regeneration, which would be quite distinct matters. From Franklin to Twain to Mencken, you can plainly detect a certain breezy approach to serious matters, and which does not cease holding to the seriousness of it.
Franklin, in his Poor Richard’s Almanac, likely invented the one-liner. Over time, this developed into “our hero” wisecracking his way through various adventures or, better yet, our hero being accompanied by a sidekick who would provide the wisecracks. Franklin also probably coined the phrase smart aleck, and a certain attitude was born. This is not to say that all Americans are like this, of course not, but it is to say that enough of them are like this, or are appreciative of this style and form, to be able to sustain it as a long American literary tradition. I am not here talking about jesters or humorists, because every culture has had their jokes and jokers. I am talking about a particular kind of humor.
I once had an interaction with a woman who objected to a certain element in my preaching, which was the fact that I felt free to use what she considered to be “slang.” This was a more formidable objection in another era, when there was a more formal recognition of what more formal discourse was supposed to sound like. People knew what it was, in other words, and they therefore knew (roughly) where the boundary between proper English and slang was. And surely, the thinking went, if you don’t hear proper English in the pulpit, then what is the world coming to? The center does not hold, the best lack all conviction, cats living with dogs, etc.
Slang was not thought to be crass or obscene, but it was believed to be “low.” My father belonged to a generation where this was more meaningful, and he never used any shoot words that I can recall, and he also worked to keep slang out of his vocabulary. It was instinctive with him, bone-deep. At the same time, this desire on the part of more educated Americans to avoid the world of casual slang was the very thing that made the exuberance of the world of slang even possible. It gave the inventive longshoreman or sailor on a tramp steamer something to push against.
But depending on how gaudy it is, I work to include slang in how I write, and I work at being colorful in other ways as well. In addition to all this, I use italics in my published prose a lot—that being a prosodic device, like talking with your hands. If you want to accent something, well, then, accent it, man.
All of this is one of the reasons why more than a few readers constantly assume that I am always making fun of them. This is because they belong to a different tradition, that say, of stuffing all the shirts, and they have trouble distinguishing a man who is making fun from a man who is just having fun. I will return to this point at the end.
We all know the main characters when it comes to shoot cussing. This is the practice of substituting words for other words, altering and cleaning them up slightly. In other words we say heck for hell, and darn for damn, and shoot for, you know, shoot. By gosh is in the form of an oath, and is subbed in for by God. I would suggest that we should think of all these as the lazy man’s slang—to be generally avoided, not because it is actual cursing, but because it is the leftover residue of a previous generation’s fastidiousness.
Please allow an illustration from my time in the Navy. I was a quartermaster, which meant that I was responsible for navigation. When we were conducting training operations, we did so in operating areas that were marked out on our charts. Obviously, the squares on the ocean surface were somewhat arbitrary, but we had orders to go out and conduct our exercises within a particular operating area. It was standard practice for us to give ourselves a “two-mile” buffer inside the operating area, to prevent going outside it accidentally. One time we had a bad navigational fix, and so the navigator told me to add another two-mile limit inside the first one. And then an inexperienced officer took over the conn in the middle of the night, and he saw what the navigator had done, and so then, in his nervousness, he had me add a third two-mile limit. Our operating area was shrinking significantly. This process, continued indefinitely, could have resulted in us sailing around and around in a tight little circle. “Hard left rudder, and hold it there.”
We tend to put two-mile limits on our language. If someone gets angry with someone for no good reason and says, “Go to Hell,” that is a curse, and violates the standards for Christian speech (Rom. 3:14). If someone tells a friend a lame joke, and his friend responds with a jocular “go to hell,” this tends to undermine the seriousness of damnation, which is no joking matter. Okay, so avoid that also. Two-mile limit. “Heck, no” instead of “Hell, no” really is milder, but also somewhat lazy. It more like filler, and not really that colorful. “The heck you say” is better, but it is hard to explain why—probably because of the syntax. But suppose that one day it is really hot outside, and someone comes in and says it is “hot as Hell out there.” Again, lazy. But suppose he says it is “hotter than the hinges on the gates of Hell.” Is that really trivializing damnation? Or is it just colorful? Or to use an expression I have referred to elsewhere, “that was blacker than the Earl of Hell’s riding boots.” Okay, that’s good.
Then there would be the expressions where the original meaning is lost to pretty much everybody. Say that a visitor says that your toddler is a “cute little dickens.” This word dickens is a substitute for devil, and perhaps your visitor is trying to tell you something. But it is more likely that he just means “cute little guy,” without reference to the prince of darkness at all. And son of a gun seems innocent enough, but it refers back to the prostitutes who used to service the British navy. When a woman was pregnant, and because of course no one knew who the father was, the child was the son of a gun. But the chances are good that when your oldest boy comes in from the back yard with a tale of some exploit, and his dad exclaims “why, you son of gun,” the intended meaning was probably not you “son of a whore.” Meanings change as meanings are forgotten.
If somebody were trying to write a short story set in medieval times, and their understanding of medieval sayings and archaic expressions had been acquired from old Batman comic books, they might find themselves using words like zounds or od bodkins. But these were originally oaths that had some real bite in them. Zounds is a contraction of “God’s wounds,” and od bodkins is swearing by the host in the Roman Catholic mass—God’s little bodies, or God’s bodikins—od bodkins.
I said that I would return to a point made earlier. Many Christians are deeply uncomfortable with this particular literary tradition. It seems to them like everybody in it is having too much fun. And when, as occasionally happens, one of the rambunctious fellows takes aim at the wowsers, and actually hits his target, it then becomes easy for them to attribute the potency of that shot to everything else that is being done in that spirit. They look at everybody having fun and assume that they are doing nothing but making fun. This is how it is possible for me to make a joke at my own expense, and to have it be interpreted as an attack on somebody else. This is the iron chain logic of two-mile limits.
“The kind of man who would claim that his argument for eliminating the Federal Reserve was ‘the butterfly’s boots’ is exactly the kind of man who would make fun of my sainted mother.”