How do Swear words get to be swear words?

I wonder if there is a single, or even a general, answer to this question. Maybe there are different routes by which a word ends up being a swear word. Someone should do a thorough etymological and lexicographical analysis of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.”

Take “fuck,” for instance. It’s from an Old English word meaning to strike or hit, so it’s a way to describe sex as an act of violence. It would therefore be a less-than-polite way to refer to something that can be described more gently. So it’s easy to see how it became a word to be avoided except in certain private contexts.

But I don’t think “shit” has the same history — though I freely admit to be inexpert about shit. I mean, about “shit”. . . .

I remember reading a discussion on “taboo words” in one of Mario Pei’s books years ago.

Sorry, that’s not much help–but I remember finding it interesting and thought-provoking.

“Take ‘fuck,’ for instance. It’s from an Old English word meaning to strike or hit, so it’s a way to describe sex as an act of violence.”

I thought it was from “fokken,” meaning “to breed.”

Is “limey” considered at all offensive?

Going by what’s been said above, swear words become bad words by being associated with social taboos or private actions. Using them is an assault on cultural values and personal space (the latter because by using words with certain associations, the swearer to some extent forces people to conjure up images of activities we consider private, ‘violating’ us). Yet at the same time it reinforces those taboos, because of the intent behind the usage. I say ‘fuck you’ because I know it will shock some people, reinforcing the idea that sex is a shameful thing, or at least something which should be kept private.

There’s always going to be a need for expressions which express either contempt for someone/something (including such abstract things as values) or anger/frustration. But, to make a very culture-bound assertion, youth culture at least is very fond of claiming that there are now no taboos. I don’t consider myself to be showing contempt or anger when I tell someone I want to fuck them, and I’ve known people use ‘cunt’ as a term of affection.

If it ever happens that taboos really do disappear – unlikely – or that they fragment – very likely – I wonder whether swear words will stagnate, since the taboo-void is most easily filled by keeping common usage, or whether different groups will come to have different swear words according to their cultural taboos, as is the case now with racist insults, but in a much more group-specific way.

Were this group bound usage to become extreme, I wonder whether there could any be any cultural reconciliation, since if we can’t at least insult the group we don’t like and don’t understand, then our frustration at not being able to do so might lead us to desire to have no contact with it at all…

There’s no set standard for “Bad” words. They change over time, as habits, customs and language itself changes. An insluting word, or gesture, in middle english may not even be understood today without a footnote. “Do you bite your tumb at me, sir?”

Most words were labeled taboo to keep a certain reality at bay. For example, the word pregant was considered bad use — even though a woman standing next to you might be seven months gone. Pressing was another “bad” word associated with birth. Other words linked to sex or death also became taboo.

Even today we invent ways around “bad” words — using terms like STD. It keeps the horror (we see the reality of the word as a horror) at bay. Remember what George Orwell said — words create reality. If we have no word for “table” then a table can’t exist.

I think I remember that Lenny Bruce advances a theory on this subject on “The Berkeley Album,” but since my stylus, is, um, fucked, I can’t confirm it. Somewhere around the “craphouse” stuff, maybe…

(Sorta) relatedly, I have always wondered how it works, the phenomenon of “issues” about speech containing homophones of slurs–I’m thinking particularly about, for instance, the notorious David Howard “niggardly” controversy…or, obviously, stuff like “gay,” etc. Someone recently even suggested to me that the phrase “a chink in the armor” was offensive to some people–although, they were definitely sincere, I’m not sure if this person wasn’t just analogizing on the paradigm of the other thing, which would be kind of weird and interesting in itself. Anyway, I’ve often wondered how exactly it happens that a slur meaning will eat up the meanings of its homophones. It seems like it tends to happen.

Just to clarify, I didn’t mean to suggest that “gay” is a slur all by itself.

Obscene and blasphemous words retain their force by a tacit agreement between those who find it useful to outrage and those who find it useful to be outraged. It doesn’t help either side if the words are allowed to become routine as we can see in the case of words like “bloody,” which have lost their ability to shock and are now merely quaint.

Dirty words are a linguistic universal, aren’t they? Like nouns and verbs – or, a better comparison – like the way some words are marked as “verb, past tense”. Such markings are very strongly conserved (in the mind). You can easily make up a new word, but you can’t easily make up a new past tense for a verb – that would take years or generations. Similarly, you can’t easily make up a dirty word or change the “dirty” marking of an existing word. So my question is why did the brain’s language mechanism evolve the ability to handle the “dirty” marker?

What about “pom”?

Perhaps we need a reprise of Monty Python’s “Prejudice” show:

“Well now, the result of last week’s competition when we asked you to find a derogatory term for the Belgians. Well, the response was enormous and we took quite a long time sorting out the winners. There were some very clever entries. Mrs Hatred of Leicester Said ‘let’s not call them anything, let’s iust ignore them’…

(applause starts vigorously, but he holds his hands up for silence)

…and a Mr St John of Hurtfingdou said he couldn’t think of anything more derogatory than Belgians.

(cheers and appluse; a girl in showgirl costume comes on and holds up placards through next bit)

But in the end we settled on three choices: number three … the Sprouts (placard ‘The Sprouts’) sent in by Mrs Vicious of Hastings… very nice ; number two….. the Phlegms (placard) … from Mrs Childmolester of Worthing; but the winner was undoubtedly from Mrs No-Supper-For-You from Norwood in Lancashire… Miserable Fat Belgian Bastards.
http://docweasel.com/members/05/tv/03/3709prejudic.html

Now in France you’d be an Amerloque, or possibly a boche based on your German ancestry, neither being quite as bad as being a beur.

The amerloque in the the friendly/derogatory category of rosbif, but the beur has no derogatory value at all. It’s simply the slang version for arab.

I suppose it derives from “arab” via the typical syllabe swapping of verlan slang.

From the BBC: The Origins and Common Usage of British Swear-words

What about “pom”?

Perhaps we need a reprise of Monty Python’s “Prejudice” show:

“Well now, the result of last week’s competition when we asked you to find a derogatory term for the Belgians. Well, the response was enormous and we took quite a long time sorting out the winners. There were some very clever entries. Mrs Hatred of Leicester Said ‘let’s not call them anything, let’s iust ignore them’…

(applause starts vigorously, but he holds his hands up for silence)

…and a Mr St John of Hurtfingdou said he couldn’t think of anything more derogatory than Belgians.

(cheers and appluse; a girl in showgirl costume comes on and holds up placards through next bit)

But in the end we settled on three choices: number three … the Sprouts (placard ‘The Sprouts’) sent in by Mrs Vicious of Hastings… very nice ; number two….. the Phlegms (placard) … from Mrs Childmolester of Worthing; but the winner was undoubtedly from Mrs No-Supper-For-You from Norwood in Lancashire… Miserable Fat Belgian Bastards.
http://docweasel.com/members/05/tv/03/3709prejudic.html

The idea that swearing is a fossil of a prior mode of language has long been a pet theory of mine (e.g. because swear-words don’t stop being swear-words when quoted) – nice to see it’s got heavyweight backing! The bit I remember about the neurology here is that, apparently, PET scans show that swear-words are processed in a different part of the brain to normal language

abb1: that Beeb site is mildly amusing but hopelessly inaccurate.

sorry about the double post – got a server error the first time, so resent.

And in the United States, there’s always “cracker” — which is offensive as can be (and a word I learned this year from hearing it in someone else’s discourse).

Though it ties several of the above threads together nicely, except the one about Belgians (who I always thought of as rather nice people, though I’ve only been through Belgium once).

Ayjay’s answer is pretty close to what I would surmise as well but I’d check Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things for a technical answer. I seem to remember running across this subject between its pages when I was reading that book for a linguistics course I took last Spring.

I meant Paul Anderson’s rtesponse, not ayjay’s (as lovely as it is for mentioning george Carlin).

Random hypothesis: Swear words of the defecation/sex variety aren’t just prudishness–they’re “bad” because, spoken, they bring into public things that we think of as private activities. The same could be said of racist language, I suppose. Racial slurs publicly acknowledge (or imply) privately-held racist beliefs, which is why in some groups (groups that deny, truthfully or not, that they hold those beliefs) the language is more shocking than in other groups (groups that don’t deny they hold those beliefs).

It doesn’t quite explain “bitch,” though. Am tempted to make very self-serving joke about bitch being in a class by itself, but I shall skip it.

Oh, and on the question of American slurs against the English: ponce, I think, hasn’t been mentioned yet. As to broader slurs against “Anglos” (i.e., whites), no one’s mentioned ofay, either.

PS. I had to resort to IE to get my comment posted. Several careful Firefox attempts never appeared unless somehow they’re still working their way thru the system and will appear later a la “pom”.

Couldn’t read everything, but —

In Catholic countries the bad words tend to be Catholic related. This includes some literature, such as Rabelais and Flann O’Brien. Usually in Rabelais the curses are euphemized. “Zounds” and “Sblood” are euphemized Catholic curses in English.

Whereas Protestants tend toward physiology.

I think that taboo words become so from the intention of the user to offend. For example, a Jewish woman I know is not offended by “bitch”, a word she uses, but doesn’t even accept “cunt” in an ironic or critical context. She feels the same about the word “kike”, whereas the word “hebe” is used jokingly by a Jewish blogger. I think that she feels that the two words are inherintly hostile to all Jews or women.

Thresholds of offense are very low among very proper people. EG, the tabooing of “leg” and “breast” when referring to chicken meat, or the the tabooing of “heck” and “darn” among serious Christians.

There’s a widespread meme in Britain that there are no swear words in Japanese. I have no idea if it’s true: if it’s false, does it constitute a negative racial stereotype?

There are words in Japanese that aren’t said in polite company; for example kuso, usually translated as “excrement”. In my experience, there aren’t so many specific words that are considered in-and-of-themselves foul, but nevertheless there are things you just don’t say in certain places and times (the above comments about register may apply here). A friend of mine (female, learning Japanese from her boyfriend) once said in front of a Japanese instructor, “hara-heta“, which really only means “I’m hungry”, but it’s very low register and the instructor was displeased.

Didn’t the infamous Washoe “invent” some swearing — refering to people she didn’t like as “shitty” (using the hand sign for excrement)?

rob g:

I really think it’s the verlan explanation. Berberes are present, but not a majority, and they like to enphasize that arab and berbere (tamazigh to them) are not the same.

Too, the phonetical transition from berbere to beur doesn’t really flow.

About les fuckoff : not heard this one, too complicated for a serious contender to “les rosbifs” or “les angliches”, that are still the real friendly/derogatory things, as in “qu’est ce qu’ils ont été foutre en irak, les rosbifs?”. But i digress.

On an aside, french slang is indeed a real, big, subject.

It has now pretty much gone, but even jobs had their ones. Thiefs slang, what-have-you-slang and my grandpa even picked the butchers slang (useless except he was always very well served by the impressed corner butcher). Verlan is now all over the place, to the point it is sometimes “squared” as uncle kvetch mentioned. Add to that the occasionnal arab word, or the weird resurected outdated french word.

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.

That said, best curses are, of course from captain haddock, with ubu not far behind.

I thught ‘teabag’ meant homosexual, and was a very clever and complex use of rhyming slang. But then I’ve only heard it used toward english homosexuals, so I was obviously missing the point. But it has never struck me as a slur.

Pom, sure, can be a sort-of-insult, but only from antipodean.
You can try to insult a brit by calling them a ‘limey’. But I think you’ll fail. Imagine someone trying to acheive against a Brit with ‘limey’ what someone else might try to achieve against a Black American with ‘N*****r’. There just isn’t the conventional context to achieve it. The Australians at least manage to be better at everything we compete with them at, which helps them achieve some sort of insult. But again, ‘pom’ can be extremely freindly coming from an Australian; I don’t think that “n*****r’ can be friendly from a white American.

So, I hold to my thesis that there are no truly bad words for Brits in American english.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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

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).

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