One of the curious paradigm shifts of the last half century has been the attitude of America's high-caste cultural elite towards salty language. (I don't say “bad” or “offensive” language, since that already begs the question. After all, offensive to whom?) There has been a major change in the way obscenity is viewed by our self-appointed masters.
Back in 1964 at Berkeley, Mario Savio started the Free Speech Movement. One of its goals was to break the taboo against using four-letter words in public. Some years earlier, the comedian Lenny Bruce did his best to shock audiences with his unfettered vocabulary and raunchy subject matter. At the same time filmmakers like Mike Nichols and John Cassavetes, who were independent of Hollywood's stifling Motion Picture Code, began to create movies with some seriously hard-boiled dialogue. Even as late as 1970 George Carlin was wowing listeners with his routine about “the seven unspeakable words.”
The appreciative audience for all these developments was the left-liberal cultural elite. It was a sign of avant-garde liberation to have no problem with salty language. Uttering four-letter words without embarrassment was a mark of one's sophistication, and more important, one's separation from the hopelessly repressed and conservative masses.
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