How many expletives does it take to land a spot in the Guinness World Records? If you guessed 868, you’d be correct.
Swearnet, a film by the irreverent trio behind the Canadian mockumentary series Trailer Park Boys, holds the record for “most swearing in one film” as of Sept. 12. With a running time of just under two hours, that comes out to roughly 7.5 vulgarities per minute.
Swearnet isn’t the only film to garner attention for its liberal use of curse words. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street features “a whopping 544 F-bombs,” more than any other feature film, according to Slate.com.
The use of so-called dirty words dates back centuries. An anonymous poem, colloquially referred to as “Flen flyys” and dating back to 1475, contained the first known usage of the F-word. Even then, the word was controversial—the author wrote it, and other select phrases, in cryptographic code.
For centuries, profanity remained hidden away as a linguistic bastard-child—a part of the language conspicuously absent from literature. Ulysses, the 1922 epic by Irish author James Joyce, was one of the first mainstream works to employ the F-word and other objectionable content, and incited such outrage that copies of it were burned for years after its release. Censorship in the form of book-burning faded in popularity in the United States through the 20th century, and in 1973, the practice sparked some outrage of its own. Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five so offended the sensibilities of a North Dakota school board, they not only banned it, they confiscated all the copies they could and fed them to the high school’s furnace.
When he learned of his book being burned, Vonnegut was incensed, leading him to pen a heated letter to the head of the Drake, North Dakota, school board.
“If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind,” Vonnegut wrote. “They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are.”
He went on to defend his use of the language found objectionable by the school board:
“It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.”
It is in that last sentence that Vonnegut gets to the heart of the issue: It’s not the words, or the sex or the violence that is offensive. It’s the context—the underlying motives, the circumstances—that make words and behaviors “bad.”
Bret Easton Ellis’ seminal 1991 novel American Psycho enraged feminists who described the book as “misogynist garbage.” The book is rife with extreme violence and misogyny, sure, but as Ellis himself said in response to the criticisms, “Clearly there are metaphors here. [The protagonist’s] actions and especially his reactions to what he does symbolize, at least to me, how desensitized our culture has become toward violence.”
Those who dismissed the book as “garbage” didn’t bother to look for context clues. They failed to understand what Ellis was trying to say.
Their failure was not lost on Ellis. He pointed out that the violent passages are “so over the top” that “it seems hard to take them in a literal context.And there are dozens more hints that direct the reader toward the realization that for all the book’s surface reality, it is still satirical …”
When we do not understand the context of a thing, we tend to assign to it an artificial context based on whatever preconceived notions we harbor, and when it comes to profanity, sex and violence, those notions are predominately negative. But we should endeavor to look past the surface of art and literature, in order to form a deeper understanding of what the creator wanted to tell us, even if our first reaction is one of offense. Even if, god forbid, it’s a movie with 868 expletives.