Dark Woke: Release the Naughty Language!
Back when I was a lad and Edsels roamed the Earth, cursing was frowned upon in polite society. Women were held in low esteem if they cursed. Men got off easier, provided no ladies or children were in earshot. If he was a blue-collar worker or a member of the military, he got extra latitude but not immunity. A man might swear like a sailor, especially if he was a sailor, but he wouldn’t when he was home from the sea.
Children, despite being sheltered, were aware that there were powerful words, often spoken in anger, that were forbidden for us to use by our elders. Instead, we ventured mimicking, imitation profanities, what linguists call “minced oaths.” These included “H double hockey sticks,” “Jeezum Crow,” and “Aw, Fudge.” My go-to curse was the horrifying “Heck.”
It wasn’t as if I was unaware of the things that swear words were associated with. I was a farm boy. There was a tall pile of cow manure behind the barn and the cows didn’t demand privacy when producing more. If you were too close, they might anoint you with the unsanctified substance. They weren’t being willful, it was just their casual, devil-may-care, barnyard way.
Reproduction is essential to agriculture. I learned about the birds and the bees and the cows and the chickens and the cats and the pigs and so on, but I started off on empty. When very small, I asked Dad why cows didn’t wear clothing. He said it was because they didn’t need pockets. It made sense at the time.
As I grew older, I picked up the standard lexicon of curse words while my parents, teachers and Father Bouchard banned their employment. Their influence diminished when I got jobs off the farm where the wide, wide world of swearing opened up before me.
I worked as a dishwasher and busboy at a hotel. I recall one older Jewish couple, guests at the establishment, discussing Yiddish. The woman claimed there was no obscene expression in Yiddish that wasn’t matched by an equivalent one in English. “Not so fast,” the man replied, then whispered something I couldn’t hear. The woman laughed for half-an-hour. I was too shy to ask what the expression was and I don’t think they would have shared it with adolescent me, anyway. That was decades ago and I still wonder what he said. And, now you can, too.
I went on to work in a shoe factory warehouse, then a paper mill. A co-worker in the warehouse used the f-word constantly. It seemed every object, every action, and every condition could be associated with it. Still, he was a nice guy.
The paper mill was noisy and the work hard. My co-workers dealt with their difficulties with colorful expressions they had acquired from rowdy living and even the criminal justice system. One fellow, also a nice guy, had served time on a Louisiana prison farm. In a conversation speckled with obscenities, he told me how you could toughen up your hands so you could chop sugar cane all day. Whenever your hands felt sore, he explained, you relieved yourself on them. He used a less refined word for “relieved”—a word now commonly used nearly everywhere to express annoyance. The ammonia, he claimed, was a miracle cure. Fortunately, I have yet to have occasion to make use of this information.
When I went to college, I thought bad language would be alien to the refined halls of academe. I was wrong. My classmates swore as much as my former co-workers with none of the workplace provocations to blame. Academic swearing was an affectation, a display to demonstrate mature sophistication while adding drama to puerile conversations. The guys put the bull into bull sessions. Co-eds liked to show that they were liberated by throwing out verbal fireworks. Professors in the liberal arts used paisley shirts, bell bottoms and cursing to show they were “down with the struggle” and cool.
Consider how times have changed. In 1960, NBC censors cut a joke from an airing of The Tonight Show. The joke included “W.C.” It’s an old, British euphemism that the Cambridge Dictionary defines as a flush toilet or a room containing one. Then-host Jack Parr walked off the set during the live broadcast in protest of this censorship and stayed off for a month.
The joke in condensed form: An aristocratic English lady planning a holiday in Switzerland is shown a suitable room. She returns to England to make arrangements to go, then remembers that she forgot to ask whether the room had a bathroom or if it shared one with other rooms. She writes the hotel and asks, “Where is the W.C.?”
The Swiss fellow who gets her letter has little English so he asks his friend, the parish priest, who has a bit more, what “W.C.” stands for. Innocently ignorant of the euphemism, the priest decides she must mean a local Wayside Chapel. He helps compose a reply to the English lady.
The letter states that the W.C. is “nine miles from the room that you will occupy, in the center of a beautiful grove of pine trees … It holds hundreds of people but is only open on Sunday and Thursday … I would especially recommend that your ladyship go on Thursday when there is a musical accompaniment … I will be glad to reserve a seat in the W.C. for you, where you will be seen and heard by everyone.”
How mild that joke seems today. Far worse has become everyday routine. No one seems bothered by it. Culturally, we are, as old comics used to say, “playing blue.” This is true in politics as well. Pundits drop f-bombs in podcasts and on cable shows, comics gleefully denigrate our leaders with graphic mockery, and the citizenry fills the Internet with extremely blunt commentary. Until recently, however, politicians themselves held back. It was a surprise to many, for example, when then Vice President Joe Biden was caught on a hot mic saying the passage of Obamacare was “a big f****** deal,” and even more surprising when President Trump spoke of “s***hole countries” and later declared at a rally “Everything woke turns to s***.”
While a true observation, it wasn’t elegant rhetoric.
President Trump has also used bad language elsewhere. This is disappointing to those who prefer PG-rated public speaking. Trump’s cursing seems to have arisen from his habit of embellishing his addresses with ad-lib remarks in which he caters to the moment and his excited audience. I suspect the “woke” remark was spontaneous and when he saw it clicked with his followers, he reused it. This is pandering but Trump’s cursing remains limited. It’s a garnish not the substance of his public speaking. So while one may lament it, it remains the case that it quite different from the way contemporary Democrats have decided to embrace swearing. They have openly endorsed cursing as a strategy and it appears to be a big part of their message. They have even given it a name: “Dark Woke.”
The Democratic Party’s leaders, frustrated with the 2024 elections and having cornered themselves ideologically with unpopular positions they can’t abandon without losing their strident base, have settled on a strategy of deploying crude curses. The left’s standard insults, “racist” and “Nazi,” have been so belligerently misused that they have become little more than ritual taunts from those who don’t care that they are emulating racists and Nazis. Even the most habitual users of these insults must have realized they have lost their impact. That leaves only crude obscenities for getting attention.
Just weeks into President Trump’s presidency, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) when asked what her message to Elon Musk would be, smiled and said “F*** off!” Knuckle head Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) snarked ungrammatically of the MAGA movement, that he could “kick most of their ass.” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) has called Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth a “f***ing liar.” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, said Trump could “Go f*** himself.” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), in a clumsy attempt to look cool, made a TikTok video of himself dropping an f-bomb. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) claimed, “Elon Musk with his high-tech ass may have hacked our last election.” Musk is clever but I don’t think he can code with his posterior.
These were topped by a media campaign launched just before Trump addressed Congress. Twenty-two Democrat senators released video statements that were nearly identical. All complained, using the s-word, that Trump hadn’t lowered prices in the few weeks he’d been president. Their campaign was named, without self-awareness, “Sh- – That Ain’t True.”
Could the Democrats have advanced less raw insults? Perhaps something classy, like a bit of Shakespeare. In Two Gentlemen of Verona, a dumb man is described as “More hair than wit, and more faults than hairs.” No, Shakespeare is just a dead white guy and the remark too well matches Democrat hair-oil-addict Gavin Newsom.
The Democrats could have composed new woke versions of old insults. How about “You person whose sexual partner is your birthing person?” Or, maybe “Eat organic fertilizer and expire.” No, that would only illuminate how far the world of the left differs from the real world.
All that was left for the Democrats to do was to summon the curses of old. I imagine their leaders gathered around a fuming pot in some dank, Washington, D.C. cellar, stirring up a bubbling rancid stew while chanting. Chuck Schumer holds up a squirming toad by a webbed foot, wraps a slice of cheese around it, drops it in the fetid brew, then calls out, “Arise ye ancient curses and endow our tongues with thy foul powers! Gift us with dark wokeness! Gather, ye needful Democrats and release the naughty words!” Or, maybe they just sent out an email.
Cursing would show the voters that Democrats are impassioned, tough, at one with the common man, and like those ’60s professors, cool. The hostility expressed through obscenity would, they hoped, intimidate opposition while spinning up hatred in the constricted minds of their supporters who would join the intimidation effort.
Leaders were once expected to be dignified, respectable examples to society. President Trump may unfortunately indulge in crude language but the Democrats have far surpassed him. They have become desperate, shameless, and juvenile. Democrat oratory has devolved from John Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you” to stuff that needs asterisks.
I’m not a saint and a stubbed toe is apt to elicit a sincere, irreligious, but palliative, call to the Creator. When needs must, I have used other impolite words. Some situations seem to demand extreme metaphorical references. However, I try to avoid swearing. It’s vulgar, shows disregard for those who hear it and lacks creativity. I had a teacher in high school who, after chiding a student about his language, said people who swear are too ignorant to come up with better words. The Democrats swear because they are too ignorant to come up with better ideas.
