The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Profanity
I RAN into Brown the other night about eight o'clock as I was com ing down Green Street. He was with two or three companions, well known men about the campus. It was a commonplace discussion that they were carrying on, but he was swearing profanely and loudly, mixing his oaths with vulgar gutter talk. I was not shocked, for as a boy I had been thrown with all conditions of the underworld—coal heavers and river rats, and ignorant section gangs, and I had heard the talk of the riff raff that follows a threshing outfit in the northwest—but I was surprised.
You must not class Brown as the ordinary loud-mouthed underclassman. He is a senior who has an educated, religious father and a refined, gentle mother. At home Brown is himself an active member of the leading Protestant church, and sometimes at vacations he leads the Christian Endeavor meeting. At college he is a prominent man. He was wearing an "I" sweater when I met him, and he is a member of one of the best known organizations of upper classmen. He is not a coarse fellow; he has simply learned to swear as he learned in the grades to chew tobacco—because he thought it was smart and made him appear grown up. He swore at first to let people know, who would not otherwise have suspected it, what a young devil he was, and he swears now because he wants people to realize what an important character he is.
Of course, at home he doesn't swear at his mother or his father or his pastor or at any one or in the presence of any one whom he respects; and at college he is more or less careful who hears him. With his profanity he tries to impress his over-worked landlady and the laundry boy, and he awes under classmen who see a good deal of his swagger and hear a good deal of his profane talk.
It is a habit easily acquired but not so easily broken. Brown does not stop to think how coarse and vulgar and commonplace it makes him; how irreverent it is. Nor does he realize how every vulgar profane word he utters throws discredit upon his teachers and his father and his mother and himself.
"Every fellow does it" is the excuse offered if one ever stops to offer an excuse. It is a common vulgar fault, too common and vulgar in fact for the college man who has opportunities and training and who, if he is to get far in the world, should have ideals above the low and the profane.
October