SPEECH, INDECENT AND VULGAR

St. James states that "if anyone does not offend in word, he is a perfect man" (Jas 3.2). There are many ways in which one may offend by speech. blasphemy

is a direct insult of God; cursing, in the strict sense, cal umny, detraction, the uncharitable slur, and the like are sins against the neighbor (and hence, against God). Of inherently lesser evil is the type of speech called indecent or vulgar, and of these two, the kind called vulgar is generally less morally reproachable than indecent speech.

Vulgar speech, of its nature, is not more than a flouting of social custom. Words once in current usage, even in good society, have come (by a shift in custom, a perhaps heightened refinement in social intercourse) to be unacceptable as a means of expression in normally polite society. Such, for example, are the so-called four-letter words. Many of them can be found, used quite naturally and not for any shock value, in the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare. They generally cannot be so used in our age without almost certainly causing raised eyebrows or the unhealthy snigger. But the words themselves, taken as vocables, are not necessarily sinful. Circumstances may make them sinful: if they are used in a deliberate effort to shock or disedify; if their use scandalizes; if their use leads the young and impressionable to consider that this is the way they should talk.

The word "decent," derives from the Latin decere, which means in its adjectival form (decens ) "becoming, proper, fitting." Even if one were to think that off-color jokes, "dirty" stories, habitual vulgar language are not in themselves sinful, their use would still be unbecoming for all who believe in human dignity, and above all for all who profess to follow Christ, from whose mouth there never issued an unbecoming word.

Bibliography: h. c. gardiner, Norms for the Novel (rev. ed. Garden City, N.Y. 1960).

[h. c. gardiner]