From Elder Boyd K. Packer of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and his book ‘in Wisdom and in Order’:
A number of years ago I went with a brother to tow a wrecked car. It was a single-car accident and the car was demolished; the driver, though unhurt, had been taken to the hospital for treatment of shock and for examination.
The next morning he came asking for his car, anxious to be on his way. When he was shown the wreckage, his pent-up emotions and disappointment, sharpened perhaps by his misfortune, exploded in a long stream of profanity. So obscene and biting were his words that they exposed years of practice with profanity. His words were heard by other customers, among them, women, and must have touched their ears like acid.
One of my brothers crawled from beneath the car where he had been working with a large wrench. He too was upset, and with threatening gestures of the wrench (mechanics will know that a sixteen-inch wrench is a formidable weapon), he ordered the man off the premises. We don’t have to listen to that kind of language here,” he said. And the customer left, cursing more obscenely than before.
Much later in the day he reappeared, subdued, penitent, and avoiding everyone else, he found my brother.
“I’ve been in a hotel room all day,” he said, “lying on the bed, tormented. I can’t tell you how utterly ashamed I am for what happened this morning. My conduct was inexcusable. I have been trying to think of some justification and I can think of only one thing. In all my life I never, not once, have been told that my language was not acceptable. I have always talked that way. You are the first one that has ever told me that my language is out of order.”
The Havoc of Profanity
Isn’t it interesting that a man could grow up to maturity the victim of such a vile habit, and never meet a protest? How tolerant we have become and how quickly we are moving. A generation ago writers of newspapers, editors of magazines, and particularly the producers of motion pictures carefully censored profane and obscene words.
All that has changed. It began with the novel. Writers, insisting that they must portray life as it is began to put into the mouths of their characters filthy, irreverent expressions. These words on the pages of books came before the eyes of all ages and imprinted themselves on the minds of our youth.
Carefully (we are always led carefully), profanity has inched and nudged and pushed its way relentlessly into the motion picture and the magazine, now even newspapers print verbatim comments the likes of which would have been considered intolerable a generation ago.
“Why not show life as it is?” they ask. They even say it is hypocritical to do otherwise. “If it is real,” they say, “Why hide it? You can’t censor that which is real!:
Why hide it? Why protest it? Many things that are real are not right. Disease germs are real, but must we therefore spread them? A pestilent infection may be real, but ought we to expose ourselves to it? Those who argue that so-called “real life” is a license, must remember that where there’s an is there’s an ought. Frequently, what is and what ought to be is far apart. When is and ought come together, an ideal is formed. The reality of Profanity does not argue for the toleration of it. ~Boyd K. Packer, In Wisdom and Order (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2013) p. 58-60 (Continued with “The Disease of Profanity II)
