There is much more profanity in common use these days. According to the inimitable Mark Twain, under certain urgent, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. Certainly it is true that there are times in a person’s life when to be denied the opportunity to express oneself by means of suitable expletives is akin to an excision of the tongue and the soul.

Denied this freedom of expression in today’s social conditions one is forced to swallow one’s ire. Surely it is unsafe to curb oneself to such an extent, and maybe it is for this reason that the habit of expressing oneself in words unsuited to polite company has proliferated (outside of these pages) to the extent that it has today.

Another reason, of course, is that we are faced with a disconnect from our past that occurred, to quote Reza Aslan, as a result of the ‘vacuums of power and identity that so often follow independence from foreign rule.’

Once upon a time people may have greeted each other thus: ‘Adaab arz hai Mirza Sahib. Aap ka mizaaj kaisa hai?’ And the response would have been along similarly florid lines. Occasionally, stronger sentiments required expression, since the idea that a gentleman never swears is a fallacy… ‘a gentleman can use foul language and still be a gentleman if he does it in a nice and benevolent and affectionate way.’ Shakespeare proved it; there is no dearth of extreme nastiness in his plays, ‘She is spherical like a globe. I could find out countries in her’, or ‘Thou crusty batch of nature,’ and ‘Out, you baggage! You tallow face!’

Anyway, in such a contingency as when stronger sentiments needed expression, a person may once have said, ‘Aap ullu hain’. Note the use of the polite ‘aap’ and refrain from blaming me for the subsequent inaccurate translation.

And so, while the Mirzas were adaabing one another, the British were busy consolidating their Raj. They played around a bit, as they do, setting one language above the other, and so Urdu suffered a calculated neglect in the educational institutions of India, and the British and their English became a role model for a culturally disaffected generation… language being held to be a vehicle of culture.

Not long after this though, the British were, in the words of an eminent son, forced to ‘make a noise like a hoop and roll away’ from the subcontinent. Subsequent generations growing up outside the Raj cast their eyes, (which had by now become used to looking out rather than in), further West and set up other role models for themselves.

An entire generation is now growing up before our eyes, flicking its fingers in imitation of unknown American rap singers, mouthing words I can only describe here as #@^T%.

Now, there are many wonderful things about the Americans, such as bermudas, T-shirts, hot dogs, ketchup and buffalo wings… but the frequent interjection into speech of foul words (by a small minority) is not one of their better ideas. One wishes that the disaffected youth of Pakistan were more discerning.

Surely, most users of profanity in Pakistan have little clue about what these words mean. No doubt if forced to look up the meanings in a lexicon they would be duly horrified, and many would refrain from the habit. However, a rational approach to issues being an unacceptable concept with our people at present; we manage to change matters only to the extent of making them worse.

Our failure to instill an adequate familiarity with our own language in our students, coupled with an unmatched ability to provide enough frustration to make a saint swear means that the youth of Pakistan, not being saints, take refuge in exactly that. They have found along this route a short cut to what they consider proficiency in a foreign tongue.

It is easier for example to say ‘%$#@ stupid’ than to thumb the pages of a mental thesaurus and come up with alternative words such as ‘inane’, ‘mindless’, ‘purile’, ‘obtuse,’. The first smacks of distant shores, and the second too close to a home that holds no allure.

— Rabia Ahmed