Adam Blumer

See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, and Part 8. What Is Unclean Speech? This past August, Kaitlin Nootbaar, a high school valedictorian in Oklahoma, realized she’d made a big mistake. During her May graduation speech, she’d used a curse word inspired by one of the Twilight movies. Now, because of this infraction, the school was withholding her diploma. According to the high school superintendent, Kaitlin had “used language that was inappropriate for a graduation exercise.” Why do I bring up this surprising story? Because it shows that even the world sometimes reveals a collective conscience, at least when it comes to bad language in certain contexts. I’ve observed this in my own experience. During my brief stint at FedEx in 2006, I heard language that would curl your hair. But once fellow employees learned I’d worked at a Bible college for a decade, they cleaned up their act in a…