Special Gifts, Devices, and Techniques : Page 142

One can say that in America today, when a group of miscellaneous men are on humor bent, it takes no more than about the fifth joke to send them careening to the swamps. Sometimes I think it futile to talk about good grammar, good rhetoric, to warn against slang, when somehow the talk of most men — from soldiers to collegians, from bankers to stevedores — as soon as women are not within earshot, is a continuous sprinkling, if not a stream, of words and jokes too vile to put in print. It appears to me that priests and ministers do not fully realize this plague, for they seldom preach realistically against it. During months in the army I did not hear a single sermon against profanity and obscenity. Likewise, mothers, wives, and sweethearts seem to have no realization of the enormous output of degrading filth their menfolks, certainly most of them, spout forth. Generally speaking, all men who do not occasionally complain against this evil, participate in it. All talk about improving American conversation is half beside the point until this smudge is repressed.