I watched a movie last night, and once again, as seems to happen every time I watch a movie set in the fifties, sixties or seventies, I am appalled at the inaccuracy of what they portray. If young people today get their idea of what it was like when I was young from the movies that parade across the TV screen and movie screens of the last few years, they will think we were just like them… but that’s not true.
When today’s movies show people of the fifties and sixties using the “F” word liberally, living with a “fiance,” or getting divorced and remarried multiple times, the people making the film are overlaying the morals of today on their history of yesterday. It’s a lie.
When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, I don’t remember ever hearing the “F” word except as a verb describing the sex act. According to my college roommate, who majored in Old English, that word has traveled the linguistic centuries intact. It was the same word, with the same meaning, a thousand years ago in England.
My father was a union carpenter his whole life, and worked on construction jobs in this country and abroad. Construction workers have a very colorful repertoire of profanity, but the only words I remember him using in that regard when I was a child were what’s considered mild today – s**t, d*m, S.O.B., and occasionally G.D. I don’t remember him ever saying the F-word.
When I was growing up, I think I only knew one or two people who had divorced, and I don’t remember them remarrying. A “divorcee” was a mysterious, wicked person that we kids were not supposed to go around much. A bad influence, my mother thought. Divorced people were in Hollywood – Zsa Zsa Gabor and Elizabeth Taylor. Real people got married and stayed married, “till death do us part.” My parents and my friends’ parents believed in that.
People did not live together either, except those wild folk that got caught up in the drugs and music of the hippie movement. A “boyfriend” was someone a girl went to the movies with, and maybe got into some heavy petting in the backseat of his car. Girls did not give their virginity away to a man they were not married to, unless they were “easy.” There was an “easy” girl with a reputation in every high school. The other girls would not socialize with her, for fear of staining their own reputation, but all the boys knew if you wanted someone you could “go all the way” with, that was the girl to take out.
When I was growing up, a “fiance” was someone who got down on one knee and asked you to marry him. When you said yes, you became engaged, set a date for the wedding, and bought a white dress.
Nowadays, any girl can wear a white dress, apparently. It no longer means she’s a virgin – which is what it originally meant.
Some people reading this will say I am naive, that I don’t remember those things going on because I was a child. That may be true. But what child today does not have some idea by the time they start school that the “F” word is something grownups say, that “fiances” are people who live together without starting a family, and that marriage is not forever – it’s just until you find someone better?
Be aware that when loose language and loose morals appear in a movie, you’re not watching the 20th century, but the world as it is today. We are living in a decadent society -- Decadent, which comes from the same root word as decay. Think about it.
When today’s movies show people of the fifties and sixties using the “F” word liberally, living with a “fiance,” or getting divorced and remarried multiple times, the people making the film are overlaying the morals of today on their history of yesterday. It’s a lie.
When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, I don’t remember ever hearing the “F” word except as a verb describing the sex act. According to my college roommate, who majored in Old English, that word has traveled the linguistic centuries intact. It was the same word, with the same meaning, a thousand years ago in England.
My father was a union carpenter his whole life, and worked on construction jobs in this country and abroad. Construction workers have a very colorful repertoire of profanity, but the only words I remember him using in that regard when I was a child were what’s considered mild today – s**t, d*m, S.O.B., and occasionally G.D. I don’t remember him ever saying the F-word.
When I was growing up, I think I only knew one or two people who had divorced, and I don’t remember them remarrying. A “divorcee” was a mysterious, wicked person that we kids were not supposed to go around much. A bad influence, my mother thought. Divorced people were in Hollywood – Zsa Zsa Gabor and Elizabeth Taylor. Real people got married and stayed married, “till death do us part.” My parents and my friends’ parents believed in that.
People did not live together either, except those wild folk that got caught up in the drugs and music of the hippie movement. A “boyfriend” was someone a girl went to the movies with, and maybe got into some heavy petting in the backseat of his car. Girls did not give their virginity away to a man they were not married to, unless they were “easy.” There was an “easy” girl with a reputation in every high school. The other girls would not socialize with her, for fear of staining their own reputation, but all the boys knew if you wanted someone you could “go all the way” with, that was the girl to take out.
When I was growing up, a “fiance” was someone who got down on one knee and asked you to marry him. When you said yes, you became engaged, set a date for the wedding, and bought a white dress.
Nowadays, any girl can wear a white dress, apparently. It no longer means she’s a virgin – which is what it originally meant.
Some people reading this will say I am naive, that I don’t remember those things going on because I was a child. That may be true. But what child today does not have some idea by the time they start school that the “F” word is something grownups say, that “fiances” are people who live together without starting a family, and that marriage is not forever – it’s just until you find someone better?
Be aware that when loose language and loose morals appear in a movie, you’re not watching the 20th century, but the world as it is today. We are living in a decadent society -- Decadent, which comes from the same root word as decay. Think about it.