Linguistics & Semiotics - General & Miscellaneous, Self-Improvement, Relationships - Interpersonal
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Overview
Most language issues from the cerebral cortex - evolution's pride and joy. But swearing erupts from the buried, primitive limbic system, which is the same part of the brain that produces passion, hatred, and aggression. As National Book Award nominee Richard Dooling tells us in his smart, funny, and erudite exploration of verbal taboos, this difference in linguistic origin explains why many people who suffer brain damage that destroys their ordinary speaking abilities can nevertheless cuss up a storm. It also helps to explain why swearing pervades all eras, cultures, and levels of human society: We have the hardware for swearing built into our systems, and nature - or at least human nature - doesn't like to let any tool lie around unused. But our capacity and our impulse to give vocal offense have always run smack into good manners, and in America these days they also run smack into political correctness and federal regulations. These age-old and newfangled conflicts provide Richard Dooling with his richest sources of insight and humor. He demonstrates in logical and hilarious detail why government rules about language are next to unenforceable, focusing directly on those that involve sexual harassment. He skeptically follows the trail of professional psychobabble about profanity, and he traces the history and meaning of several primary English curse words and their tendency to wax and wane in transgressiveness. Right now, for example, "hell" is often used as a conversational litmus test for dirty-word tolerance, and it's the only common imprecation that doesn't involve scatology or sex. But in Blue Streak, Dooling makes a convincing case that "Go to hell" should be regarded as the ultimate insult, and he proceeds to prove that cursing is not only part of our biology, but a necessary component of any religious view of the universe.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In his novel White Man's Grave, Dooling showed he could write hilariously about the absurdities of law. Here, unfortunately, his armchair musings on law and folkways meander between entertaining and dyspeptic. "[I]n response to gender politics, the government now intrudes into almost every important aspect of our occupational lives," exaggerates the author, an attorney specializing in employment discrimination law, obviously on the defense side. His excursions celebrating "the restorative powers of blue-streak cussing" are enjoyable enough, especially as he assays dictionaries to show how long-standing neglect of dirty words is being supplanted by the new slang dictionaries. Similarly amusing are his investigations into the literary pedigree of our leading four-letter words. In between, he slaloms through prominent Supreme Court cases concerning offensive speech, teasing out inconsistencies and idiocies, and slams campus speech codes. It is the claims of verbal sexual harassment"hostile environment," as opposed to the easily evaluated quid pro quo varietythat enrage Dooling, and he catalogues some rather silly court cases. But his general argumentthat the "language police" support the Orwellian idea that law can help end hatredis somewhat caricatured, unleavened by either reportage or (hint) a fictional approach. Author tour. (Aug.)Library Journal
In this romp through the netherworld of blue language, entire chapters are devoted to our favorite barnyard epithet, Satan's domain, and the multipurpose four-letter word generally considered the king of obscenities. But Blue Streak is not just a linguistic treatise. Dooling, an attorney and novelist (White Man's Grave, LJ 4/15/94), focuses on politically correct language police who try to banish negative attitudes by abolishing the words used to express them. Admittedly "self-consciously confrontational," taking delight in tweaking government dictates against verbal sexual harassment, Blue Streak, though cleverly written, is guaranteed to offend many readers, even those who do not shrink from its language. Book selectors should travel at their own risk.Jim G. Burns, Ottumwa P. L., Ia.Donna Seaman
Dooling's flair for satire and disdain for hypocrisy were evident in his novel "White Man's Grave" (1994), and here, in this analysis of the status of free speech in our "politically correct" era, his scorn runs rampant. As a lawyer specializing in employment-discrimination cases, Dooling has witnessed the downside of sexual harassment law: tens of thousands of hopeless cases. So his ire over the meddling of "word police" in what are, frankly, ordinary fractious verbal exchanges between coworkers makes sense, especially since he seems to recognize the seriousness of genuine complaints. But Dooling is so abrasively dismissive of women and so quick to oversimplify gender differences, that readers may find themselves bristling at his bluster even as they recognize the validity of his main point: language can be offensive, but the right to speak freely must be protected. As part of his maddening but ultimately entertaining argument, Dooling offers lively histories of "dirty" words and provocative theories about why they're so compelling.Book Details
Published
August 1, 1996
Publisher
New York : Random House, c1996.
Pages
256
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780679444718