Cursing: An Endorsement

The other night I caught the end of the movie THREE KINGS on TV. I don't remember what channel it was on, but they had commercials, and it was edited. This meant that all the swear words were replaced with more suitable words that would, I assume, be deemed less offensive to a mass audience.

While this may be true on one account, the dialogue they chose to censor the cursing with was, to my ears, exponentially more offensive. For example, in one scene an American soldier drags George Clooney to the ground and screams, "You frag me? Now it's my turn to frag you!" A few seconds later, another soldier shouts "Bullsquat!"

Let's put aside for a moment the insult to my intelligence that is asking me to accept that a soldier in the midst of a war would actually yell "Bullsquat!" instead of "Bullshit!" Go back to the first example. "Frag you" is supposed to replace "Fuck you"? "Frag" is barely a real word! No one says "frag you"! This otherwise ordinary piece of dialogue has been rendered completely ridiculous.

All you overprotective parents out there: is it really that important to shield your children's delicate ears from the word "fuck," to the point where you want them picking up vocabulary that has virtually no real-world meaning? Wouldn't you rather they go around sounding somewhat normal, as opposed to saying "frag you" to some kid at school and getting ridiculed all the way home?

It's sadly comical that we're permitted to watch Mark Wahlberg blow the top of an Iraqi's head off in the very first scene of this movie, but must be protected against hearing swear words by having them replaced with nonsensical impostor words. If you really must censor our cinema, just mute or bleep the curses, so we at least know what the intention was. Pretending we live in a world without swearing is just fragging bullsquat.