I think violent language is bad for my health—my physical, spiritual, and emotional health. The words we’re talking about are weaponized, loaded with anger, and their intent is to smash and incite. Are we supposed to believe that weaponized language has no effect on an audience that hears it over and over?

I don’t get it. From theAll Posts time The Gilgamesh Epic was written on clay tablets 5,000 years ago, until recent times, world literature got along fine without word bombs, and so did the movie business in its first five decades.

So on this weekend of the 89th Academy Awards, I have to ask: Why do filmmakers keep using those words? You know the ones. WORLD Magazine doesn’t print them. My wife and I have a strong negative reaction to them. When Kris and I were growing up, we never heard them in our homes. We never heard them in movies or saw them in books.

That began to change during the unrest of the 1960s, which started as a reaction against racial segregation and the Vietnam War, but became a rebellion against almost everything. Prominent writers (Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Phillip Roth, John Updike, Larry McMurtry, and others) began using forbidden language in books and articles. They won prestigious awards and kept pushing the limits, and the words started showing up in movies.

It’s been going on for more than 40 years. In time, maybe violent, abusive language will lose its punch and fade away, but that hasn’t happened yet. It infuriates me when I spend money on DVDs that bring it into my home. It instantly makes me dislike the movie.

It’s as though I had bought a box of granola that was loaded with salt. I’m buying cereal, I don’t want salt, and why should I be put in the position of eating something that is distasteful to me? It destroys my interest in the product, and it’s bad for my health.

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