On Tuesday, President Barack Obama joined the ranks of public officials who've used profanity in public – if you can call it that, which apparently you can since The Atlanta Journal-Constitution can only print the a-word here if it appears in quotes.
His statement on NBC's "Today" show, in which he said he's been talking to Gulf Coast fishermen and experts on BP's oil spill "so I know whose ass to kick," was fairly tame by presidential standards. But it raised the question of whether we've become a little too loose with our language.
"In a culture that is becoming increasingly casual and sometimes a little more coarse, it is not surprising that those lines have become blurred," said Andra Gillespie, assistant professor of political science at Emory University. "The fact that the president used the a-word isn’t that big a deal, but the larger issue is that he has been criticized for being feckless about the way he has handled this and people have been clamoring for him to be tough.
"The use of the strong language is an attempted signal to the public that he cares about the issue and some heads are going to roll as a result of this."
And certainly kicking a little a-word is more emphatic than making heads roll.
Obama's bad word is the same one then-Vice President George H.W. Bush used when asked how he did against Geraldine Ferraro in the vice-presidential debates in 1984. "We tried to kick a little ass," he said.
Former President George W. Bush raised the bar when talking to British Prime Minister Tony Blair regarding the escalating conflict between Lebanon and Israel and saying, "What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this [expletive], and it's over."
Vice President Joe Biden upped the ante on public profanity when congratulating Obama on the Health Care Bill, saying off-microphone, "This is a big [expletive] deal." Except he wasn't off-microphone.
The trend goes way back to 1960 when Richard Nixon called John F. Kennedy an "[expletive] bastard" backstage for using notes in their debate. This, after Nixon had upbraided then-President Harry Truman for an off-color remark and pledged to maintain the dignity of the office. "Bastard" was okay. It's the word before that offends. (The tip-off is we can't actually print that one, even if it is in quotation marks.)
"When they have gone back over tapes of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, they had potty mouths," Gillespie said. "If they were 5 years old, their mouths would have been washed out with soap."
Which words will generate a negative reaction just kind of depends, said Susan Tamasi, senior lecturer of linguistics at Emory University.
"Is ‘ass' a bad word? Sort of. Are there levels of bad words? Yes. A word is just a set of sounds and we attach a meaning to it. It has some social meaning attached to it as well,” Tamasi said. "‘Ass' or ‘hell' 20 or 30 years ago were more obscene and taboo, but have lost it in many ways."
In Obama's case, his word choice reflected his frustration, she said, but there was so much further he could have gone.
Like when then-Vice President Dick Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) to "Go [expletive] yourself," on the floor of the Senate, after Leahy's criticism for Cheney's relationship with the Halliburton. The incident occurred as the Senate assembled for its class photo but Cheney later told an interviewer that the comment was merited at the time.
“In some ways, [politicians] speaking in that type of colloquialism offends people who try not to swear," said Gillespie, "but on the other hand it makes them look like everyman.”
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