What the Hell, and WorseAmerica contains multitudes. And even if we don’t have a truly common language, it pays to know how truly common our language can be.
By Peter W. Wood
January 15, 2022
In my freshman year of college, way back in 1971, I took a course on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama from a British-accented and British-named Professor Alfred Wanner Satterthwaite. The course introduced me to an abundance of 16th and 17th century playwrights who were not named William Shakespeare, upon whom Professor Satterthwaite cast so intense a light that we would be blinded to other sources of illumination. So we plunged into Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson, Thomas Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher, John Webster, and many others. Their plays remain vivid to me even now—not that Professor Satterthwaite was an especially good teacher. He was a digressive fellow who would meet his students at home in his private study while he sucked on his pipe and told stories, many of them with a blue tinge.
He drew a key distinction between what he called the “comedy of f___ and the comedy of s___.” Or to be a little more delicate, sex comedies and potty humor. He meant all comedy is one or the other. I have never been clear whether that’s a good distinction. (Can’t a comedy indulge both? Isn’t there anything else?) But I vividly remember how Professor Satterthwaite relished saying those two words. Of course, at age 17 I had heard them plenty of times before. I attended public school in Pittsburgh neighborhoods where everyday student vocabulary had more of the blast furnace than those two words. But I never heard them rolled trippingly from the tongue of a cultivated Englishman extolling fine literature. That was new.
The genial and even more cultivated John McWhorter recently delivered a short and somewhat alarming book, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever. McWhorter teaches linguistics (and lots of other subjects, including music history) at Columbia University, but I think it safe to say he is best known as a linguist, and one who has charmed his way through 20 books and hundreds of essays. Nine Nasty Words continues his charm offensive—with emphasis on both those words. The charm he possesses is that of a relaxed and convivial conversationalist, a reincarnation or an avatar of the late Professor Alfred Wanner Satterthwaite, but without the British affectation and with a great deal more to teach. He brings his credentials as a black American to the table but not in the fraught tone of claiming special insight. Of special insights he has plenty, but they reflect scholarship not racial privilege. But his charm offense does have an offensive part, and it too is also a bit Satterthwaitian: McWhorter delights in naughty words. Or at least most of them.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/15/what-the-hell-and-worse/
