So very naughty

Okay okay okay, one more. It's also from NYTimes.com. You know, it really is a good paper, Jayson Blair aside.

Here we have The Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told. While I will seek out and see the referenced documentary "The Aristocrats," I don't post this article because I necessarily agree with everything in it. Frank Rich wishes we could depart once more from our resurgent Puritanism and just cut loose, the way we used to back in the... in the... when, exactly? The mid 1990s maybe? I don't know. Rich doesn't quite say.

No doubt there is a resurgence of prudishness in this country, but that isn't entirely a bad thing. A resurgence of prudishness would have been welcome in the ancient Rome that sentenced thousands of Christians and Africans to die as gladiators. I'm not saying we've reached that point yet, but seriously, how far away from that are we?

Of course, you'll note that the rise of the evangelicals and the return of puritanism hasn't exactly toned down the blatant sexuality throughout our culture. No, no it's done nothing about sex. But God forbid somebody should say something like, I don't know, 'shit.'

It just seems to me that we're focusing on the wrong thing here. If the Righteous Ronnies want to get their panties in a wad about something, how about Christina Aguilera's wardrobe? Why not carp about how you can't even go to a PG-13 movie anymore without seeing bare tits? I'm not personally bothered by that, mind you (I need to see some somewhere), but a line needs to be drawn. Every movie marketed towards people under the age of 35 centers either around sex or grisly death. Isn't this more significant that some foul language?

I side with the people who say that dirty words are just a sign of a lazy mind. This doesn't stop me from using them, of course, but nonetheless I'll agree that a wide vocubulary makes foul language less important, though not necessarily indispensible. But I wonder whether foul language's foulness is really so very foul when compared against the whole of modern American culture. I'm not inclined to think so.