The Future of Swearing

FOUR-LETTER WORD GAMES by Renatus Hartogs with Hans Fantal. 186 pages. Evans. $5.

Back in 1940, Dutch-born Psychiatrist Renatus Hartogs suffered a traumatic experience on a Long Island highway. Unable to fix a flat tire, he summoned a garage mechanic, who

failed also. "I can't get this wheel

off!" the fellow cried. Dr. Hartogs was astounded. As he recalls: "The idea of a wheel engaging in sexual intercourse perplexed me."

Then a revelation hit Dr. Hartogs:

English is virtually without gender--it is, in fact, suspiciously without sex. Dr. Hartogs was educated in Germany, where a girl (das Mddchen) is neuter, spring (der Fruhling) is masculine, and a door (die Tiir) is feminine (apparently the doctor cannot bear to hear one slammed). As he sees it, a language in which only he and she are sexed must be up to no good. In English, what is the sex of a bicycle, an eggplant, a subway? None. And what does this engender? According to Dr. Hartogs and Hans Fantel, a "professional writer" who has tried to guide the psychiatrist through sexless English, Americans turn "grammatical lack of gender into a linguistic sex orgy" as a reaction against --guess what? "The Puritan tradition."

Vassar Vulgarity. Dr. Hartogs had to suffer another traumatic experience before he could explain all about the mechanic, the wheel and the word. The impetus was the 1959 federal court decision that D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was not obscene. Later that week, at a "fairly fashionable party" on Long Island (a place he should obviously avoid), Dr. Hartogs heard that word again--not from a greasy mechanic, but from the lips of a "splendidly groomed and passably pretty specimen of suburban femininity," who uttered "a string of barracks words paraded with a crisp Vassar inflection."

There and then, Dr. Hartogs decided that he had stumbled on "a significant clue to the psychodynamics of our culture." According to his theory, the Chatterley decision set Vassar girls to start cussing like gamekeepers. Clearly, he met few Vassar girls before the decision. But now he hears from middleclass patients what he once heard only from ghetto types such as those he encounters as chief psychiatrist of the New York Detention House for Juvenile Delinquents.

Mask of Fear. Dr. Hartogs' eight-letter thoughts on four-letter words are confusing enough to make a saint swear. On the one hand, he says that excessive swearing may be a "symptom of pre-schizophrenic personality disintegration." On the other, he regards the growing use of obscene language as "a rising index of spiritual freedom." But he can't quite tell: it may also be a "mask of fear" and "the last resort of the non-achiever." This is simply to say what has always been known--that dirty words are not always to be taken literally. As Dr. Hartogs prefers to put it in psychiatric jargon: "Even the crudest obscenities are sometimes circuitous in terms of the patient's true intent." Or the doctor's. Years ago, in his celebrated essay 'Lars Porsena,' or the

Future of Swearing and Improper Language, Poet Robert Graves put the case more simply; people, he noted regretfully, were swearing more but enjoying it less.

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