Variations on "pardon this, codger!" (long)

[Mike Salovesh]

"Dennis R. Preston" wrote:

"PS: In fact, an old study of Antarctic researchers (where have I heard
that  Antractic word before?) in whch a psychologist kept count of all
obscenities, found that the research team she worked with fell off
considerably in their use of obscene language when they were angry or
faced  serious problems. For them (upper middle class scientists, for
the most  part) obscenity was play and friendship, not anger and
seriousness."

Dennis:

Yup.  Academic intellectuals are playing when we swear; you've got to
watch out for us when we revert to our native Academese.  I'll add two
illustations out of field trips I made to the Mexican state of Chiapas,
as part of a series of multifaceted, multi-university anthropological
studies.

1) Anthropologists working on the various projects were spread pretty
far and wide throughout highland Chiapas, and travel was difficult,
particularly during the rainy half of the year.  At intervals of ten or
twelve weeks, we did try to come together in a city on the PanAmerican
highway. We would then exchange progress reports and work on
coordinating our ongoing research.  The trips to San Cristóbal de Las
Casas also gave us a chance to renew supplies, exchange reading matter,
and relax.  The reunions were the next best thing to vacations, and they
let us speak English, the first language of most of our crew.

I'm an army veteran, I've done occasional fieldwork with gang members
and participants in organized crime, I've consorted with lots of people
at the bottom of the U.S. socioeconomic status ladder, and I've taught
classes in Illinois prisons (including Stateville, the notorious maximum
security facility.)  Never in my very checkered life have I heard people
use as much profanity, obscenity, and just plain nasty language with
such frequency as was typical of ordinary speech among the collections
of professors and advanced graduate students who joined those academic
reunions/working sessions in the field.  We were just like those upper
middle class scientists in Antarctica.

2) My knowledge of obscenities and profanities in Spanish is pretty wide
and deep, for a gringo.  While in the field, I developed a monologue I
used to trot out for the entertainment of my Mexican friends.  It
started with "When I first came here, I was both innocent and pure.  But
the longer I stay, the more los putos hijos de putas de este pinche
aldea me han enseñado como chingar a la madre . . . " and went on for
nearly 30 seconds.  (That may not sound very long, but try building such
a speech in your own first language, without repeating yourself, and
you'll recognize that I'm bragging.)

One day, I got involved in an altercation with my landlord that was all
too public.  In the course of the interchange, he pulled out a pistol
and told me to get mine.  Enraged, I asked him if he thought I'd never
seen a pistol before.  Then I said I didn't need a pistol to deal with
his threats, and that he had better put that thing down or I would break
off his arm and wrap it, pistol and all, arond his neck. . .

As the story of the event circulated through the town, people from all
over came up to me and complimented me on how I hadn't insulted or sworn
at my landlord throughout the whole episode.  I hadn't even put him in
his place by calling him "tu" or "vos" instead of "Usted".  That, they
told me, was as clear a demonstration of cold-blooded control in the
face of extreme provocation as my wife's ability to remain seated,
serenely calm and sipping her morning coffee, throughout the whole
argument.

Well, gee, we didn't do what we did for the reasons people attributed to
us.  I was so angry that I completely forgot the whole range of low
vocabulary I had spent so much time learning.  For me, swearing in
Spanish is a game, and I was in no mood for playing at that time.

As for Peggy, she kept her seat at the breakfast table on purpose.  She
didn't want to distract me while that pistol was part of the interaction
-- she knew I had to focus all of my attention on what the landlord was
going to do next.  She kept sipping her coffee to hide her trembling.

I did raise my voice, however, and it carried far.  Soon after the
argument began, our next door neighbor came running into the scene,
pistol in hand, to cool out the situation. HIS nextdoor neighbor, the
town's judge, was right behind him, also with his pistol out.  The
town's "Public Minister" (roughly speaking, the District Attorney), who
lived across the street, took a little longer to arrive carrying his
pistol, but that was because he has a leg deformed at birth and he can't
run.

The Presidente Municipal (more or less equivalent to the mayor) happened
to be at his cattle ranch that morning, but when he came back to town in
the afternoon he insisted that we move into one of his houses at half
the rent we had been paying. "Once we get you moved away from that son
of thus and such ["hijo de tal por cual"], I'll find a way to settle
with him."

I think the statement about profanity reflecting a speaker's lack of
vocabulary has the whole thing hind end to.  It's not a question of the
one excluding the other; some of us are demonstrating greater breadth of
vocabulary precisely when we choose to use profanity in addition to the
rest of our normal speech.

-- mike salovesh           <salovesh at niu.edu>                PEACE !!!

P.S.: In the end, that set-to with my landlord was probably the biggest
break of that whole field trip. It all started becase I defended the
rights of Indian kids to be free from a nasty bit of exploitation our
landlord was trying to impose on them. That didn't hurt my standing
among the Indians I was there to learn from. The house the mayor offered
was in the middle of the Indian part of town, it had running water on
the house site, and it put us where we could keep track of the comings
and goings of all the people who came to see him at his adjacent house.
We couldn't have dreamed of a better place to live in the field.  The
quality of my fieldwork took a quantum jump for the better when we moved
to the house the mayor made available.