David Mamet: Back When We Gave a Fuck Profanity was once a useful weapon. Now it’s a dull blade.
“The profanity of the streets was not used to curse, but to accentuate or embellish,” writes David Mamet. (Jack Mitchell via Getty Images)
As a young man I’d been excused from the politesse of a middle-class upbringing, and found myself free to figure it out or starve. I found my day-to-day and hand-to-mouth employment among folk whose speech inspirited the hell out of me. I note: fellow cab drivers, our customers, in their infinite variety, the hustlers and thieves I met in the North Side poolrooms and poker games. They inspired me to write, and I did. Two of my earliest plays—American Buffalo (1975) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1983)—are written in the profane language of the Chicago streets. Critics accused me of riding buses with a tape recorder and transcribing the speech I heard. I took it as the compliment it actually was. For I was not, of course, transcribing the speech of others, but imagining myself into their situations and, like them, talking my way out of them. This article is featured in Culture and Ideas. Sign up here to get an update every time a new piece is published. Profane is Latin for “outside the temple,” meaning something unholy. And the Church traditionally appropriated to itself the power to curse and excommunicate the heretic. “May you be cursed in your Sitting and your Standing, in your sleeping and waking,” and so on. The profanity of the streets was not used to curse, but to accentuate or embellish. “Fuck you,” in those days, was the challenge to fight. (It survives in today’s more effete “fuck you, get a lawyer.”) The f-word, of the actual folk, then and now, is a rhetorical tool. ...
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