By JAMES D. WATTS JR. Scene Writer on Mar 22, 2012, at 9:42 AM Updated on 3/22 at 3:12 PM
ARTS
Tulsa native Tracy Letts won the Outstanding Actor in a Play at the 58th annual Drama Desk Awards, presented Sunday night ...
A great many things must work together properly for an airplane is ever going to leave the ground.
The same thing is ...
Tulsa Ballet’s “Off the Floor: Creations in Studio K” continues through this weekend at the company’s headquarters, 1212 ...
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I greatly admire Kristin Chenoweth’s talents as a singer and comedienne.
And in the conversations we’ve had over the years – from 1999, when she was nominated for and later won a Tony Award for “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” to her being inducted last year into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame – I have found her to be a very intelligent, very determined and very sincere woman.
But I still can’t quite bring myself to say – or to type out here, even – the original title of her latest TV project, the cartoonish soap opera that now goes by the acronym “GCB.”
That’s just the way I am. And it would seem that I am one of an increasingly rare group.
Scott Andrews, a professor of American and American Indian literature at California State University Northridge (and my roommate in college, lo these many years ago), write a blog called “Seeing Things,” that takes slightly academic and wryly humorous look at the convulsions of American popular culture.
His
most recent entry is about the sudden prevalence of … shall we call it “The B Word” in TV shows. (WARNING: One of the ways Andrews makes his point is with a quote from a Kurt Vonnegut story that is uncensored.)
Of course the word itself has been around for years – from its benign use to identify female canines to serving as the title of songs by the Rolling Stones and Elton John to being an apparently indispensable term in rap music.
Now it’s become the popular pejorative of the season. But, as Andrews writes, if the use of this word loses its ability to shock, becomes just another part of our mainstream conversation, does that mean all the hate and contempt that word has carried for so long is now equally as acceptable?
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