Banana

Some decades ago an economic advisor to the President warned that if we didn't get inflation under control, we were going to "have a big depression." He was instantly summoned to the White House and chastised for his candor. He was told he must never again use "the D-word."

This gentleman, who had a sense of humor, agreed. The next time he held a press conference, he warned that if we didn't get inflation under control, we were going to have "a big banana -- a banana worse than the Great Banana of the 1930s."

I bring this up because I want to write about a word that I hear all too often at ConVal, a word this newspaper cannot print. Let's call it "banana."

I hear the B-word two or three dozen times a day at school. It is used as a noun, a verb, a modifier, or, most often, as an emotional intensifier: "I am banana tired of this banana banana, so don't banana with me, banana!" I hear it from freshmen and seniors, vocational students and college prep. I hear it from boys and girls, about equally. I hear it in the halls, in the cafeteria, in the parking lot, in the gym, in the theater -- anywhere students gather to socialize with each other. I even hear it in the classroom, but rarely addressed to me: If a student says "banana" (or "kiwi" or "mango" or "uglifruit") to a teacher, he or she gets sent to the office.

My students would ask, what's wrong with profanity?

Well, it's embarrassing when guests are around. One teacher told me she was walking a parent from the main office to the front door, a distance of perhaps 50 feet, and they heard "banana" three times. It's also boring and unimaginative the way students use it. Invective can be an art form, and even profanity can be colorful and witty, if it's not reduced to a monotonous repetition of one-syllable words. When Mark Twain's wife tried to embarrass him into stopping his swearing by ripping off a string of oaths in public herself, he commented: "She knows the words, but not the music."

Finally and worst of all, it's infectious. When I started teaching, I found myself swearing far more often. I'm ashamed to say that I even used "banana" in class once. You become desensitized to it. Discourse is brutalized. The school begins to sound like a prison yard or a war zone.

Profanity is appropriate in prison yards and war zones. I require my Modern Literature students to read books like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the best novel yet written about the Vietnam war, and watch "Slam," a movie about a young man whose gift for poetry literally saves his life in prison. Both works are filled with profanity -- if they were not, they'd be phony and absurd. It's all in the context. As O'Brien writes, "Send guys to war and they come back talking dirty."

You don't have to go to war anymore. My students hear words like "banana" in popular music, in popular movies, on television. They hear them on our playing fields, at our places of employment, on our street corners. They hear them in our homes.