Time for new obscenities? Yawn.

When "F*** You" is a nominee for both the Grammy's record and song of the year, and the National Portrait Gallery hosts a Christmas season exhibit of "gay art" that included an image of Jesus on the cross with ants crawling into his wounds, you know there's very little left that can shock the public.

The problem is not with the outrageous terms and visuals themselves--or even that they get wide exposure.  Cee Lo's expletively-titled song remains an honoree with negligible reaction to its moniker. The "gay art" show continues. The problem only arose with the Gallery's "Hide/Seek" exhibit because taxpayers were footing the bill, which subjected it to greater scrutiny.  And when objections surfaced, the one item of removed "art" was soon displayed a few blocks away in a private gallery, where it receives little comment, other than from advocates who want the video featuring the disrespectful scenes reinstated in the show.

"F*** You" by Cee Lo Green, a catchy ditty that airs on radio with FCC acceptance in a moderated version, "Fuh-get You," hasn't become a cause celebre, nor does the song contain much controversial aside from two words.  Its message of frustration at rejection by a gold-digging girl is clever but wouldn't fly without its bouncy tune.  The music video has more than 28 million hits on YouTube, and its scenes in a diner of the child, teen and young adult Cee Lo enduring and then responding to being spurned, despite its punctuation with profanity, is lighthearted.  The Supremes-like girl back-up group adds to its ambiance. Actually, so many repetitions of the expletives serve to diminish any impact.

If anybody expected a huge outcry about how disgusting or upsetting the "art" or Cee Lo Green's lyrics are, he was sure to be disappointed.  Sure, we can lament the plummet of politeness, but the relaxation of language has rendered once-shocking words impotent.  If the best a really angry person can do to express his consternation is the f-word, well, it's more of a chuckle than an affront.  If someone wants to rattle the public by producing the most disgusting or institution-jabbing visual he can imagine, he can indulge his fantasy, and if some gallery owner thinks it will sell, it will be hung and viewed and maybe even called "art," but unless it does something to a Koran, it won't get much reaction.  We've all seen whatever-it-is before in movies, or after watching a flick's trailer, decided we'd rather not see it--but either way, ho-hum.

Remember when The Stones' "Satisfaction" and the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" had their slurred lyrics interpreted as so nasty parents forbid teens from listening?  Well, nobody else does, either.

It'll take some pretty creative inventing to come up with swear words that provoke overwhelming shock and revulsion, ever again.  Do we need new obscenities to fill the lack?  I'd say no, but given today's cultural climate, somebody is bound to try.  Nobody's exempt from the influence of media; as my husband and I wrote in a book on childhood innocence years ago, avoiding popular culture is like trying to stop breathing.  Parents would do best to discuss the issue, to distinguish between words that elevate and those that cheapen and downgrade.  They'll do their kids a favor to set standards for speech in their own families that complement standards for behavior.

But ultimately, when confronted with harsh language, they'll all probably do what everyone else is doing anyway--shrug it off.

New Words Needed for Gay Spouses

I'm a stickler about words, being of the "Eats Shoots and Leaves" perspective. Punctuation, too. (Not sentence structure, obviously.) So when today's NYTimes featured a story about married lesbians calling each other "wife," I noticed.

The writer, Sarah Sarasohn, married her spouse 13 years ago. (See, they didn't need any kind of legal re-definition to do it!) But the thing that got me was that she and her mate, the other mother of the children Sarasohn bore, decided that their commitment should be a political statement rather than a personal life situation: "Using the term was about irony and politics." When first married, Sarasohn used the term to be "very in-your-face. It derailed whatever other conversation I was having because I had to explain what I meant by 'my wife.'"

Her concern at the time was that "wife" implied "servant," and that was not her intent.

Let me underscore that I am not objecting to Sarasohn's choosing a life commitment with another woman.  I have views about deeming this "marriage," though, and it's related: blurring the distinction between male and female diminishes the specificity of our language; renders the words ("wife," husband," "marriage") an amoebic goo that makes analysis of our world more difficult.  And analyzing, synthesizing, dissecting the world--ie making judgments--is the essence of intellectual pursuit.

We've already got a gender-neutral word for married partners: spouse. We've also got "partner," not as specific and not necessarily marital. But this is about preserving a descriptor for the unique combination of opposites, male and female.

Why should we preserve these distinctions?  We're just smearing into an amalgm of people anyway, flowing in and out of relationships, some of which happen to have the governmental benefits of marriage, others of which are easier from which to extricate.  Evolution and enlightenment. Broadening definitions so they're not so sex specific, or status-specific is more descriptive of the real world.  But on the other hand--why not expand the vocabulary, rather than contract it?

Perhaps there should be two new words for gay "husbands" and "wives" that more accurately reflect their own unique types of combining.  Their two-of-a-kind of uniting certainly deserves its own special language. Instead of glomming onto the old-fashioned words, the ones that since the start of the English language have meant male and female's joining, with the usual outcome of creating a new generation, gays should be creative enough to find words that reflect their own special sensitivities.  Let "marriage" remain. Then Ms. Sarasohn and other lesbians won't have to worry about the servant-like connotations that "wife" carried, or the bread-winner history that "husband" used to imply.

She and her "wouse" (woman spouse) could be just as "in-your-face" with their own word. Gay men can make a statement referring to their...well, "mouse" is taken.  We've got "domestic partners," but devise a new term for commited gay couples that isn't the gender-linked term "marriage." Leave "wife" and "husband" so we can at least have more choice in language, rather than less.