Saratoga News

Point of View

Carl Heintze

Venting the frustrations of growing up

Walking through a mall parking lot the other day, I came across six young people, two girls and four boys in and around two cars. The girls wore straight hair, T-shirts and jeans; the boys, the obligatory baseball caps turned backward and the necessary baggy pants and Nikes. All were, in defiance of the surgeon general's report, smoking cigarettes, and loading from one car into the other.

They gave me reason to stop, not because of their clothes or smoke but because of their language, loud and loaded with what a friend used to call the biological participle.

It was sprinkled through the speech of both the boys and the girls at intervals of about every third word, sort of as punctuation. But it was loud and obvious, because, I had no doubt, they wanted it to be loud and obvious. Their language at once depressed me (why would they want to make English speech sound so awful?) and impressed me (what kind of a statement did they think they were making?). I thought about it after I watched them screech off to be lost in the mall parking-lot traffic.

The teen years are those in which we graduate from childhood to adulthood, years in which we are trying to find out who we are, and, if I remembered right, the years in which most of us made statements, often uncertain statements.

It wasn't their dress that was off-putting, because I did dimly remember that dress was one of the ways in which we tried to define who we were when I was growing up. For instance, it was a big deal in my teens to wear wool black belted overcoats. They weren't really necessary because of the weather in California. It was how they looked, or how we thought they looked--grown up and, well, powerful.

We took them to basketball games and football games and sweated through them in discomfort. But, wow, we were telling others who we were, that was for sure. It was about the time that we got our first driver's licenses, a chance to use the family car and be if not free at least a lot less dependent on our folks for rides.

We didn't wear baseball caps. Indeed, wearing headgear was definitely not the thing to do. Our fathers wore hats with snap brims, and we wouldn't be caught dead in a hat.

We also, if memory serves, smoked for the first time. I can remember rolling our own cigarettes from toilet paper and filling them with pipe tobacco and getting nauseated--although not, fortunately, upchucking.

We were smoking in secret not because of the taste or because we wanted headaches, but because that meant we were adults. In those days adults smoked like chimneys, and we wanted to be adults.

But I had more trouble with the obscenity, obscenity for obscenity's sake, as it were.

Obscenity in speech has always been off-putting for me. It fouls up language, something which has forever been wonderful for me. Words have been the way in which I've made my living all my life, and I've always been loath to use obscenity.

For one thing, it's not expressive. For the most part, it's limited to three or four old Anglo-Saxon words relating to bodily functions of one kind or another, used not for that purpose but to emphasize speech.

Since there are so few obscene words, and since they sound and look so unpleasant, why would teenagers want to use them with such frequency? And then I remembered they were a fixture in the following experience in my life: World War II. In the service, we used obscenities in exactly the same way as these teenagers used them, frequently as punctuation.

We used them, it seemed to me, chiefly to get rid of frustration and anger. And we were angry and frustrated a lot, most of our waking hours. I remembered wallowing around in the snow along the Belgian-German border for a whole day, trying to dislodge a German outpost.

I think I used more obscenities that day than I have ever used since, for one good and simple reason: I didn't like where I was, I didn't like being cold, tired and scared and I didn't like those who were telling me I had to stay there.

I thought it was like that for the young people I had seen. Growing up and moving from being kids to adults is both frustrating and anger-producing, and they were using mostly meaningless obscenity to make it clear they didn't like what was happening. Or they didn't understand what was happening. Or they weren't sure what was happening.

That left me with some hope for them, some hope that eventually they would advance into adulthood, frightening and frustrating though it might be. And that there they might eventually understand that dress is not a complete statement of self, and smoking is a signature not of maturity but of stupidity, and language has beauty, if properly expressed.

I also hoped they would realize in the meantime that even youths are not immortal and they would drive more carefully--and eventually become adults, too.

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