Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 11, 1991 TAG: 9103090409
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEVERLY BEYETTE LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
This little phrase, sandwiched between deleted expletives and a big dollop of damns and hells, seemed just a bit, well, less than presidential.
True, profanity and vulgarity were no strangers to some earlier residents at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Harry Truman, never one to mince words, was given to calling people he disliked - among them Gen. Douglas MacArthur - s.o.b.'s
Still, a certain amount of propriety has always been assigned to the office and those who hold it.
Nevertheless, a by-now-famous George Bushism - "kicking ass" - appears to be one of the linguistic legacies of the Persian Gulf War.
The nation hardly managed a collective blink last December when the media, reporting a meeting between President Bush and members of Congress, quoted the president as saying that, if there was a war, Saddam Hussein was "going to get his ass kicked."
The president delivered and, just last Friday, expressing his satisfaction with the quick cease-fire, Bush noted that Hussein had indeed gotten properly "kicked."
In between those two pronouncements, as war raged in the gulf, military and civilian leaders and "Top Gun" pilots went around talking about "kicking ass" in the Middle East. At home front rallies in support of U.S. troops, "Kick Butt" placards sprouted alongside those proclaiming "God Bless America." On Someone respectable uses it in a respectable context [and it's suddenly OK.] Edward Finegan Professor of linguistics University of Southern California city streets, "Kick Ass" T-shirts were spotted. Radio, television and newspapers embraced variations on the theme, quoting Bush, field commanders, field soldiers and grandmothers.
Only six years earlier, the same George Bush had kicked up a mini-storm after his television debate with Democratic vice presidential hopeful Geraldine Ferraro. He told an official of the International Longshoremen's Association that he had "tried to kick a little ass."
The remark was picked up by a TV crew's boom microphone, and at a news conference later in Birmingham, Ala., Bush found himself explaining away his indiscretion. Kicking ass, said the adopted Texan, is "an old Texas football expression . . . and I stand behind it. That's the way I talk, so get it accurate."
He said that "anybody who's ever been involved in athletics - particularly Texas athletics" knows that it's "a way of expressing victory." Not only did he admit using it all the time, but he said his kids use it. He acknowledged, however, that his mother, Dorothy, then 84, "will probably be disappointed in her son. It's a generational thing."
But this is 1991, and linguistically speaking, just about anything goes.
"Someone respectable uses it in a respectable context" and it's suddenly OK. "That's exactly what happens," says Edward Finegan, professor of linguistics at the University of Southern California.
Words, he explains, go through a "process of amelioration" during which they pass through a taboo stage into general acceptance. "If you go back to Victorian times, the word `pants' was regarded as vulgar, an Americanism for pantaloons."
Finegan suggests, too, that the feminist movement helped topple linguistic barricades.
"Much of the cautionary use of these kinds of words has been because people said, `Well, in mixed company you don't use them.' " Once men and women feel free to say them in front of one another, he says, "then they can say them publicly."
Depends on the context
The origin of "kicking ass" seems unclear.
In the "New Dictionary of American Slang" by Robert L. Chapman it is a noun, described as college slang, to mean a good time. For example, "We went downtown and had a kicking ass." Jonathon Green in "The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang" enters the phrase as a verb, meaning either "to beat someone up" or, in campus usage, "to have a good, if boisterous, time."
Dealing with vulgarities that have crept into common usage presents dilemmas for the media.
George Cotliar, managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, said: "It depends on the individual, it depends on the context,. . . but we would prefer avoiding vulgarities."
When the Times ran the transcript of the Watergate tapes, Cotliar recalled, "maybe once or twice we were compelled to use the expletive." But, "that was a different time in a lot of respects."
As for "kick ass," Cotliar said, "If the president of the United States is talking about going to war against another nation, there are certain things you're compelled to use, I think. You know also it's going to be the sound bite over the lead on every television program."
But, he added, "If a reporter used it to spice his or her story, we'd unspice it."
According to Alexandra Wilson, special assistant to the general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission, kick ass is permissible on broadcast stations because it is not "patently offensive under contemporary community standards."
Even "the f-word" is permissible, she said, if used in a serious manner. And some newspaper executives say they would print that word, albeit reluctantly, if President Bush said it.
If Middle America was offended by Bush's language, the White House claims not to have heard about it through its hot line. "We've gotten nothing recently about profanity or kicking butt or ass or what have you," says a spokeswoman.
Ronald Butters, who chairs the linguistics program at Duke University and is editor of American Speech, a quarterly, does not find this lack of response surprising.
"General social change has altered mores in enormous numbers of ways, language as well as what kinds of bathing suits people wear, how much skin is permissible to show in a magazine ad, the works," he said. "Language is just one reflection of the social change."
by CNB