Comments on: How do Swear words get to be swear words?

By: Greg

Greg — Sun, 24 Oct 2004 00:23:03 +0000

I’ve heard that the reason swear words are swear words is because of the Norman conquest. The French came to England and took over society, essentially becoming “high society”. They were the lawyers and doctors and government types. This affects our language to this day. Nowadays, when you want to sound fancy and high-falutin’ you use a word dervide from Latin or French instead of one with Anglo-Saxon origins. “Utilize” instead of “Use” or “Demonstrate” instead of “show.” This gets into swearing because the French doctors coined the clinical terms that are acceptable to use “Defecate”, “Urinate”, and “Copulate”, instead of “shit”, “piss”, and “fuck”. Before the Norman Conquest these were normal everyday, non-shocking terms, but in high society, anyone using the Anglo-Saxon terms was considered low class.

By: snit

snit — Sat, 23 Oct 2004 05:15:17 +0000

Hi Justin, When I was a grad student, I was an assistant to a prof who was very proper and very intimidating. Looked like Karl Marx with slightly tamer hair. A month into the semester, he’d opened a lecture by screaming, “Eat Shit!” at everyone. He then launched into a lecture on the sacred and profane, linking it up to the way societies tend to creating dualistic systems of norms (tacit rules that guide our behavior) and sanction against violating those norms (taboos). How do you see a norm. By breaking it. A prof who says “Eat shit” is violating an implicit norm that governs the classroom. Plenty of profs swear—I had several who said fuck. But what he did was tell his students to “eat shit.” As someone else pointed out, taboo words are also called swearing or profanity. They didn’t always refer to body parts or bodily functions. Swearing is taking something sacred and making it profane. So why is cunt offensive? Dickhead? Motherfucker? Dicks. Cunts. Fucking. Ordinary, everyday, human things. How is saying “shit” taking something sacred and making it profane? As someone suggested, the words reflect private activities. Yes, and what is really going on is that they’ve become private because social organization and technology have created a world in which they can be. What these taboo words point at is note just privacy, but the individual and the ideal of individualism that has been made possible by a complex, technological sophisticated society that has made privacy—and thusour individualistic sense of self—possible at all. In our liberal (lower case l) enlightenment world, the individual is sacred. Can you think of anyone who would tell you they aren’t an individual? Very few, if any. We no longer worship a shared god. We do, however, worship the individual. I don’t mean that we are a bunch of eogists. Rather, we worship the very idea of the individual—separateness, uniqueness, distinction, difference, independence. A lot of the Victorian prudishness is related in to the privacy issue since the Victorian era is also famous for institutionalizing what is called the separation of spheres. The family and all things related to family life (like sex) were supposed to be shielded from the cold, cruel, heartless world of politics and work. Anyway, end of lecture and a far too wordy, rambling post, off the top of my head post, but your prof asked for a lecture to make him look smart. :) I haven’t taught this stuff in years and it’s late, so I hope I’m making sense. snit

By: digamma

digamma — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 21:15:22 +0000

Bad words in English come from Anglo-Saxon. Their equivalents from Latin are nearly all appropriate in polite conversation. Discuss.

By: yabonn

yabonn — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 15:37:34 +0000

several slang/nonstandard terms for “shoes,” for instance—the now archaic “godasses” and the more current “pompes” .. and “godillots”, “grolles” or “pataugas” (originally a brand) or again “ecrase-merde” or “rangeos”. Shoes are a good example. I’m sure i could find other more outdated equivalents, if i could only put my hands on my “petit simonin illustré” (yes, there are even slang dictionnaries).

By: David Tiley

David Tiley — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 13:50:34 +0000

“Pongo” is an offensive Australian term for the English. I presume it refers to smell and the Australian belief that the English don’t wash enough. We do of course have many more taboo words to denigrate Aborigines.

By: Sharon

Sharon — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 09:47:14 +0000

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/fwordflash.html

By: Jonathan Kulick

Jonathan Kulick — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 09:07:43 +0000

Ummm, sorry about the multiple posts yesterday. Yes, I read the admonishment not to hit “Post” more than once and to be patient, but my browser (Opera) insisted that it had received no reply from CT—zero bits—and then disconnected. Now I know not to believe everything I read on the web…

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 05:50:52 +0000

Justin, It’s interesting to note that swear words that referred to bodily functions/parts or sexual acts only became swear words in the last 500 or so years (at leats in the west). Prior to that, almost all taboo words had religious connotations. Swearing, in essence, consisted of swearing to God (or gods) in inappropriate contexts. Something about Victorian and Protestant concepts of depravity, however, turned things around. It’s probably not a coinincidence that swear words are also referred to as “vulgar.” The words that became swear words, as opposed to official or accepted terms, were often the words of the common people.

By: Thersites

Thersites — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 04:31:50 +0000

The way to think about this is via baseball. The “magic word” in baseball is “motherfucker.” Whatever you’re bitching to the ump about, that word will get you thrown out of the game. The referent & content of the word, note, is not relevant. Yell “you have intercourse with your maternal parent” will not evince more than a suspicious glare. Try it! No, obscenities are more or less arbitrary determinants who is in & who is out of a given discursive social situation. Fuck yeah!

By: Justin

Justin — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 01:42:05 +0000

Hi I’m the student that originally asked the question of professor Brighouse and I would like to add my thoughts to this blog. When I asked the question I had in mind the seven dirty words that the FEC will not allow anybody to utter on television or radio. Harry mentioned that the question arose because we were talking about hate speech in class. Well I hate to admit it but that was just wishful thinking on his part. The truth is this thought occurred to me because a friend had me listen to the George Carlin comedy skit “seven dirty words.” I think that to get at the heart of this matter we must first think about how children come to swear words. I remember one day during the first grade a friend of mine taught me a song that had the word dick and asshole in it. I didn’t know what those words meant but I started singing the song with him because he seemed to enjoy singing it. Well eventually a teacher heard us and sent us to the principal’s office. I remember that I was asked to come into the office to talk to the principal by myself. By this time I was very frightened. I was a good kid and had never been sent to the principal’s office before. A few times I had gotten my name put on the blackboard with a check mark next to it for talking in class, but I had never done anything that could get me sent to the principal’s office. What was worst of all was that I didn’t even know what I had done wrong. The principal sat me down and asked me if I knew what those words meant. I told him I didn’t. He then told me something to the effect of “those are bad words and we don’t say them because they hurt people’s feelings.” I agreed to never again say those words and was allowed to go back to class unpunished. Well, mostly unpunished. The principal did call my mother to tell about what had happened. I was very scared that the principal had to call my mother but when I got home she said the same things the principal had said and I wasn’t punished. The point is that I think the main reason people are discouraged from using those words is that they are simply unpleasant. They embody a thought that some would rather not think about. For example as “bad jim” pointed out people seem to be more comfortable with butt than ass. That brings us to the question why? Well to answer why lets first look at the definition of both words. According to Merriam-Webster online the word butt; in the way we mean it, is short for buttocks, which means: “1. The back of a hip that forms one of the fleshy parts on which a person sits. 2. The seat of the body.” Those are the only two definitions for the word buttock. It seems that the general connotation of the word is such that we use it to objectively describe something rather than to assign value. Now lets look at the definition of ass. It is commonly used as a noun meaning a stupid, obstinate, perverse person or as synonym to buttocks. It seems to me that people use the word ass instead of butt because they know that ass will convey a sense of vulgarity better than butt will. It all goes back to the reason we use words in the first place. Words are nothing more than symbols we use to convey ideas to each other. Swear words are used simply because we know that they will convey some offensiveness that other words will not. Still that leaves the question, “Why exactly are words that are synonymous with certain bodily functions the most offensive?” I’m not exactly sure how to answer that but I will say that it seems odd that we are more offended by the statement “Hitler was an asshole” than the statement “Hitler systematically killed millions of Jewish people to empower himself.”

By: Tadhgin

Tadhgin — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 00:55:17 +0000

Re: “Nigger” vs. “Limey” or “Pom” Remember that in Oz when they want to say something bad you will be a Pommie Bastard – changing the meaning of Pom. Irish have been called Paddy and Mick but never abandoned these as names. Although when used by, say Airport police at Heathrow, it is clearly insulting, in general Irish people will have no problem with the idea that the are Micks or Paddies and don’t often find themselves in a context where it is insulting (not least because today they are likely to feel superior to the English or Americans) In Northern Ireland however the name used as typical for Catholics was Taig and is now considered quite an insult – probably comparable with Nigger. The thing is this only happened in the North of Ireland and in the South the name continued to be used (even if not an awful lot and it is pronounced a little differently). So there was nothing unusual in my being given this name when I was born. Now I live in Belfast and I have had a few experiences of good protestants not wanting to say my name because they feel that it is a bad word. (Catholics who have more contact with the south have no problems and just use the name)

By: Diablevert

Diablevert — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 23:50:17 +0000

Hmmm. Seems to me like some of y’all are overthinking a bit on the bad words query—- bad words are bad becuase they’re the words for the worst things we can think of. We call upon them when we wish to curse—- when we desire deiliberately to be offensive and hurtful, and to express strong emotion (by breaking a taboo). I don’t think it’s “uptight” to not want to hear them; it is the simple fact that there are gradations in discourse—- a diffrence between the words we use in polite company and those we don’t—- that gives them power. To deprive them of power by overuse is actually to limit the amount of emotion that can be expressed in language. As long as shit stinks and motherfuckin’ ain’t right, you’ll need words to express your extreme discomfiture with those things.

By: vernaculo

vernaculo — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 22:57:28 +0000

Interesting that people feel comfortable using “fuck” and “cunt” and “bitch” here, but not “nigger”. “Nigger” is a bad word, but not a swear word. It isn’t used to vent frustration or express surprise, or for emphasis. The swear words I know of in english are either spiritual or sexual/elimination terms. It’s fascinating that the censors of American TV won’t allow the word “fuck” but they will allow “damn” and “hell”. The power base for that censorship purports to believe that hell is a place of eternal damnation, and at the same time that children are the most sacred of us all. Yet the act which brings children into the world is dirty somehow. Hmm. The original question was “why?”, though, not “what?”. I think a case could be made for the social control of sexual identity creating a taboo around explicit words. So that the veiled awareness of sex and sexual parts is echoed in the veiled language. Certainly the establishment of sexual taboos in the prepubescent is easier than it would be in the ragingly hormonal adolescent. Kids accept the taboos along with the rules of traffic and how to work the microwave. It’s just how things are. Consequently the rise of sexual identity comes through a filter of judgment and prohibition, a “wrongness” that’s already established before there was any sexuality to judge. This pits the teenager against herself/himself. The normal natural feelings they have are vaguely or specifically wrong, the shortest natural words to describe those feelings and the acts that charge them take on that taint of wrongness, and using those words directly without smirking or giggling puts the user outside the taboo cordon sanitaire. Naming the act and the parts of the body involved without genuflecting toward the operative prohibitions makes the namer an outlaw of sorts. The remnants of medieval religious dominance in the “drat/darn/damn/goddamn” hierarchy are the spiritual analog of that. Both taboo areas being generated by social control of essential human interfaces. Sex and God, what else is there? Food? The words become bad because using them means you don’t honor the institutionalized sacredness of the things they name, or conversely, its profaneness. Sexual taboo has been used as a device for social control for millenia. The idea that in the “afterlife” sinners will be punished for all eternity – “damned” – is another very effective way of controlling large groups, an unimpeachable back-up threat for moral codes and regulations. Using the words “God-damn” and “hell” lightly means you don’t believe the threat, or don’t take it seriously, which means you’re a threat in turn to theocratic social order. That’s why these blasphemies no longer sting – we don’t have theocratic control over us anymore. It’s sexual control now. This is why you can show the shooting and stabbing and dismemberment of human beings on television, you can sell a billion dollars worth of computer games that are nothing but virtual killing sprees, but you can’t show a man and woman making love to each other. Sex is how we’re chained together now, so sex terms that don’t acknowledge the taboos are an act of rebellion. A hammer slip that smashes a thumb puts the hammerer outside the social order for a moment, and he demonstrates this with a “curse”. The absurdity of yelling “shit” when your pain receptors overload is balanced by the satisfaction of removing yourself from the ranks of the obedient, a return to the cradle and the summoning cry, an insistence on the primacy of the self, above and outside the needs of social order.

By: Uncle Kvetch

Uncle Kvetch — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 22:55:46 +0000

rob g: I’m with yabonn, I think it’s pretty much the consensus view among those who study these things that “Beur” is a verlan variant of “Arabe.” More generally, i feel common words in french are very often doubled with a slangish equivalent, more so than in english, though my ignorance of the language explain that. I’ve never encountered scholarly corroboration for this (and g_d knows I’ve read enough on the subject), but that’s my unscientific impression too. I remember a French guy going over his body from head to toe and giving nonstandard variants for virtually every body part and item of clothing. Just the fact that there are several slang/nonstandard terms for “shoes,” for instance—the now archaic “godasses” and the more current “pompes”—when we have no real equivalent in American English. Oh, and bitchphd: I’ve never heard an American utter the word “ponce,” unless they were reproducing British speech. I think of that word as strictly English English.

By: DLacey

DLacey — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 22:00:28 +0000

Reading the above, I would combine the “use associated with emotional triggers/taboos” and the “use comes from another part of the brain” and suggest that it might be that by long use to evoke strong emotions, the word becomes an emotional trigger, and therefore becomes a taboo itself… and the fact that religion and excretion and sex are the three main areas that create this emotional trigger is interesting also.