Caregiving: Bad Language is Damaging

By ALEX CUKAN

I thought I was done writing about Don Imus, but halfway through The Sopranos Memorial Day marathon on cable’s A&E network, my 85-year-old mother asked, How much longer are we going to watch this freakin’ program?

Let’s just say that in the time I have known her, I’ve never heard my mother use bad language, or my father for that matter. In fact, I never heard bad or disparaging language until I heard it on the TV sitcom All in the Family, which ran on CBS from 1971 to 1979. The show pioneered the use of bad language and racial epithets. Before its first telecast, CBS provided the following disclaimer:

The program you are about to see is ‘All in the Family.’ It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices and concerns. By making them a source of laughter we hope to show, in a mature fashion, just how absurd they are.

There is a school of thought that says art merely reflects the culture and that’s why Don Imus, Tony Soprano and Archie Bunker use bad language. Sticks and stones may break bones, but words will never hurt me.

There is another school of thought that words can cause as much, or even more, damage than being hit. What I found absurd was how anybody could call Bunker a lovable bigot, because there is nothing lovable about bigotry. Norman Lear, the creator of All in the Family, said he patterned Bunker after his own father, but Bunker was like no father I ever knew.

I grew up in a working class neighborhood; thousands of houses that were 700 square feet to 1,000 square feet and had been hastily built after World War II. It was cramped and crowded.

The fathers worked in steel mills, flour mills, auto factories and rail yards. There were construction workers, cab drivers and truck drivers. There was drinking, there was violence, there was mental illness. There were members of organized crime.

But there wasn’t a lot of bad language. I never heard anyone swear, I never heard racial epithets — inside or outside my house — from adults or from kids. Bad language may have been used in the rail yards or the factory, but it was not used at home, in stores or on the street.

Bernard McGuirk, who used to be Don Imus’s producer, said on FNC’s Hannity & Colmes that he grew up in a working class neighborhood with bad language.

I didn’t grow up with a bunch of rich white kids in the suburbs, McGuirk said.

But he didn’t grow up hearing the word ho either.

McGuirk and Imus were fired from the radio show Imus in the Morning, after referring to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as nappy-headed hos.

It was for fun. The word (ho) is so prevalent, we wanted to be cool, he said. It’s a pejorative slang term for a woman.

I’ve heard from a lot of Imus fans who truly miss him because he was their champion for autism, cancer or sudden infant death syndrome, and I can understand that with so little being offered to caregivers, they value any help they can get.

There are numerous studies showing that bullying hurts the victim. But more recent studies show that just being a witness to the bullying of others also has a negative effect.

A study published last week in Springer’s Journal of Youth and Adolescence found that not only were the victims of bullying affected, but so were the witnesses — so much so that the teens ages 11 to 19 exposed to high levels of relational aggression perceived their school as a hostile school environment. As a result, the boys — but not the girls — were more likely to carry weapons to school.

Most school bullying research has focused on hitting, pushing and name-calling, but this study looked at other forms of aggression that target victims’ relationships, such as telling false stories about students.

There is already strong evidence to link relational aggression with social anxiety, loneliness, depression, peer difficulties and substance use, according to researchers at Montclair State University and the University of Michigan.

A similar study found the same thing in U.S. workplaces. A study published in the Journal of Management Studies has revealed that U.S. employees are bullied up to 50 percent more often than workers in Scandinavia.

Pamela Lutgen-Sandvik, one of the first to investigate the impact of bullying on non-bullied employees, says the negative effects are widespread.

The study concluded that U.S. organizational and cultural structures frequently enable, trigger and reward bullying.

It certainly did for Imus. As a shock jock, getting fired for saying something shocking was a good career move, because it resulted in a lot of free publicity, more fame and usually a better gig. Before Imus got fired, my mother didn’t know who Imus was or what ho meant.

Lutgen-Sandvik says U.S. companies stress the importance of managers over workers, which discourages collaborative efforts and enables powerful organizational members to bully others without recrimination.

That’s pretty much the reason given for the current nursing shortage. Trained, experienced nurses in their 40s and 50s are quitting work because of their poor treatment.

– Alex Cukan is an award-winning journalist, but she has also been a caregiver since she was a teenager. UPI welcomes comments and questions about this column, e-mail: consumerhealth@upi.com.