Purgatory 2024: Obscene language
I'm seeing the C word used casually a lot by some as if it's no more of a big deal than twat (which was also offensive in its time and still is in some places).
It's certainly not a word I'd use myself - I'm not a prude about swearing IRL but I do draw the line at this. But I have questions.
We all need to let off steam sometimes and some of us can and do vent in colourful language. Some use euphemisms, some express emotion with outright obscenities. However, with the passage of time, these can become so familiar that the shock value or emotive force wears off. These words may even become acceptable and casual. If they don't carry any more emphasis than any of the others now, then how are people going to vent extreme annoyance / exasperation / insults verbally if they've already taken to using the (formerly?) unsayable casually? Invent something new or just resort to the tried and (frankly) tired?
I admit to being put off by seeing birthday cards and Christmas cards with "shit" and "fuck" used humorously, and seeing this emblazoned in mottoes on T-shirts. I wouldn't want to hear small children coming out with this sort of word - but they do.
Suitable for conversation anywhere? In the office? For family gatherings? Where would you draw the line - or wouldn't you?
It's certainly not a word I'd use myself - I'm not a prude about swearing IRL but I do draw the line at this. But I have questions.
We all need to let off steam sometimes and some of us can and do vent in colourful language. Some use euphemisms, some express emotion with outright obscenities. However, with the passage of time, these can become so familiar that the shock value or emotive force wears off. These words may even become acceptable and casual. If they don't carry any more emphasis than any of the others now, then how are people going to vent extreme annoyance / exasperation / insults verbally if they've already taken to using the (formerly?) unsayable casually? Invent something new or just resort to the tried and (frankly) tired?
I admit to being put off by seeing birthday cards and Christmas cards with "shit" and "fuck" used humorously, and seeing this emblazoned in mottoes on T-shirts. I wouldn't want to hear small children coming out with this sort of word - but they do.
Suitable for conversation anywhere? In the office? For family gatherings? Where would you draw the line - or wouldn't you?
Comments
Mostly, my swearing tends to be of a blasphemous variety, eg. a habit I think I picked up from certain older relatives. "Jesus Christ On The Fucking Cross" etc.
I am a non-Christian, but I think my propensity toward sacrilege probably stems from the same psychological source as my interest in theological discssions on the Ship: Christianity is enough part of my cultural background as to make theology interesting and blasphemy cathartic.
As for the dilution of emotional force brought about by overuse, I don't know if that has to happen: sorta like how telling one's spouse "I love you so much" isn't weakened by the fact that the main word there is also used in sentences such as "I really love ketchup." Context and tone-of-voice can make a big difference to meaning.
This reminds me of a birthday card that I saw one adult give to another adult, when I was a kid. The front-cover had a cartoon of a woman, dressed in a fashion meant to look seductive, giving come-hither eyes to the viewer.
The text...
I wanted to give you a present
I wanted to spend more than a buck
But most of all, I wanted to give you
A truly sensational...
And on the inside:
Wish for good luck!
I'm pretty sure that I was the only person at this gathering who understood the implied joke.
There seems to be a constant search for the word which will be the most powerful in shock value.
I was taught that swearing was not acceptable language and that there was no need for it. I have found this to be true. A ‘doh!’ or an ‘oh bums’ work just as well - or are they swearing to some people too?
However, I have never used the c word. I find it misogynistic and am slightly taken back when I see men use it on here. In my childhood it was only used by a certain type of man on the council estate, usually racist, misogynistic and homophobic, and said in a violent and abusive way. I find the word triggering.
Yes, to hear the C word and the F word on the street, rather than the barn, these days is even jarring to me. I especially hear it among the college age adults. I would like to smack them upside the head and tell them to clean up their language.
I have always liked this routine from George Carlin.
I actually went the other way - I don’t think I ever swore at all much before I hit the Fleet at the age of 21. Years working with sailors in harsh conditions had an impact on my lexicon. I now have two registers - office and in front of my own small children, never at all. Down the pub, depends on the company but can range from not at all to every sentence.* Not ‘that’ word, but many of the others. It became reflexive. I’m not proud of it but it speaks to my past. And I was an officer. Is outrage.
*I have a lifetime of masking behaviours which mean I instinctively try to fit in with whoever I’m with (not consciously but immediately). Put me with a Scotsman and within minutes I have Scottish inflections; a working man’s club and I’m one of them; the officers’ mess and I’m minor gentry. It’s exhausting. I sort of know who I am but only tangentially.
I was genuinely shocked the first time I heard it. But it is used with a bit of a smile.
Odd.
That word seems to be the only physiological one that for us carries that taboo. Slang terms for other parts of the body seem to not have the specific weight of that one. I wont list the others or it will get a bit Chaucerian.
No criticism intended, but I find it intriguing that in the above paragraph, you first used the euphemism for the gynecological swear word, and then switched to the real word when quoting your sons.
Was it the fact that the second usage was a quote that made the difference? Or just a random switching between terms, with no intended pattern?
I tend to hear
Swearing as a behaviour is in itself quite useful - this is a pop science summary - but there is quite a lot of research on this.
Perhaps I'm old fashioned.
It was the fact that I was quoting. And I have a vague memory of a dictionary definition of that word that describes it as being used affectionately between friends rather than aggressively.
I’ve spoiler texted in my post, out of habit more than anything I think. I consider the thread title is sufficient warning that this thread is likely to include language the reader may find offensive - but this could be revisited if needed.
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I get very tired of hearing people using the F word in normal conversation - "So I was fucking walking down the street, it was fucking raining and she fucking says to me..."
I was taught the same thing, and have found it to be untrue. I don't have the wherewithall to evaluate them, but there are studies showing that swearing alleviates pain.
Swearing is of course far more rhetorically effective if used sparingly. We had a priest who I never heard swear, even in casual conversation -- until he gave a sermon on the slaughter of the innocents following the Newtown massacre. It was the most effective use of the phrase "God damn" I've ever heard: "God damn America."
@Belisarius told this joke once:
Q: How do you say the alphabet in the Bronx?
A: Fuckin' A, fuckin' B, fuckin' C ...
There's this joke about two soldiers.
"There we fuckin were, just out the fuckin pub. Walking down the fuckin road. Past a fuckin hedge. In the fuckin field we saw a fuckin man and woman .....
having sexual intercourse."
I try not to frequent Hell so much these days and also not to swear so much here. I once offended the wife of a Shipmate I respect and drove her off the Ship and I regret that greatly.
I was going through a rough patch at the time but that's no excuse.
I don't like swearing for swearing's sake or to look 'cool.'
I thought it was completely unnecessary for actors Brian Cox and Martin Freeman to use the 'f' word on the recent over-hyped drama documentary about the life of Shakespeare on BBC2 recently.
'Shakespeare wouldn't have had time to hang about, he had a fucking show to put on,' said Freeman, completely unnecessarily.
I don't use the 'c' word and would only do so when quoting.
It certainly appears to carry more misogynist freight in the US than in the UK and Ireland though but there are regional differences here as well as the generational element that has been mentioned.
And knowledge is shit.
And I agree that swearing that targets someone-- "you" whatever-- is much worse than other kinds.
Oddly enough, the word "cunt" has no emotional significance for me whatsoever. I think it's because I had never heard it before age 25 or thereabouts--we favored "fuck" and "shit" instead--and so I have to struggle for a definition when I hear it (which is still like, never).
On the other hand, my father used "bloody" in every other sentence, leading me to the conclusion that it is a mild term used to express minor frustration. I gather others feel differently.
I believe "bloody" is actually blasphemous, referencing the Crucifixion. But, yeah, I usually hear it used in statements like "I waited all day for the bloody e-mail, but the guys at head-office never sent it."
I think it is relatively mild though I'd still be inclined to substitute with something more polite at the office, or in formal settings or with people I didn't know well.
I have often noticed Americans describing someone (even the Queen) as badass which to me is a very offensive term and one which you would never hear in my country.
I don't bother using slang as I value language too much. Certainly there are some expressions that I find offensive, but they may not be offensive to the user or many listeners. Maybe if you find people are upset by certain language we should bridle our tongues.
What bothers you so much about "badass"? Is it the anatomical suffix? Similar constructions get euphemized as "-aleck", as in "smart aleck", though "bad aleck" probably wouldn't really pack much of a wallop.
Where I come from, "b*****" just means "tough and brave". A former defense minister(for the progressive Liberals) who had served in Afghanistan got lauded on-line as a "b*****" after his appointment was announced. He later said he enjoyed the meme, specifically singling out the "b*****" phrasology.
I could imagine someone(sure, maybe an American) saying it after finding out that the snooty old Queen had worked as a mechanic during World War II.
Though maybe originally with a somewhat violent "outlaw" overtone, like a wild-eyed killer on the battlefield. But, as of late, I've also heard it without much implied maniacism, eg. "That clerk chased the shoplifter all the way to the parking lot. She's a badass!"
Some time in the mid-90s, the company launched an ill-fated ad campaign with billboards featuring a cartoon of Jack eating meals while sitting on the toilet. There was at least one newspaper editorial against this, and the ads were soon dropped. I do understand ironic juxtaposition, but I don't know how anyone thought it was a good idea to link the consumption and the elimination of food in a single billboard.
Reminds me of a rhyme from my (RC antipodean) childhood:
Bloody in the Bible, bloody in the Book/ if you don’t believe me take a bloody look.
It's a suggested etymology but doesn't appear to be well supported.
https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/bloody
Whether any swear word is acceptable or not depends on the people who hear it. Words that one group of people are fine with another group are not. There are no absolutes. I don't swear much - mostly when I am on my own (or think I am alone).
Something I've wondered about...
Would a more directly Latin derivative like "copulate", for example, have only come into the Isles via the Norman Conquest? Or would it have been around earlier, if only among an elite, as a result of Latin being the language of churchmen etc?
Okay. So my earlier crucifixion-related explanation is probably wrong as well.
I wonder if "gadzooks" really means "God's hooks", ie. the nails that hung Christ from the cross, or if that's another false etymology.
(Though, really, what else could "gadzooks" mean? It's not like there's any other obvious explanation, as there is with "bloody".)
I'm intrigued by @Lamb Chopped's father's use of it as I'd always been told that it was virtually unknown in the US and seen as a particularly British term - rather like 'jolly good show' and other hackneyed phrases from old black and white British films.
I knew a Welsh preacher who was introduced to an American congregation as 'a bloody good preacher'. The guy who introduced him hadn't realised it was a swear word and thought he was making the visiting British preacher feel at home.
It'd be a bit like a British person dropping 'Goddamn' or 'Badass' into a conversation or announcement thinking that it would be culturally appropriate for an American audience.
It would depend on the audience of course.
Given the number of Latin and Greek (Church is Eaglais, for example) derived words in Scottish Gaelic I suspect that a direct source in Latin is entirely possible. On the other hand Gaelic has "feis" for "sex[ual intercourse]" (not to be confused with "fèis", a festival) which may or may not be related to "fuck" (particularly considering the Hiberno-English "feck" which has a similar vowel).
Another classic that regularly gets cited is 'debt'. That in Middle English was dette, from French which had got it from Latin debitum. Some know-all in the sixteenth or seventeenth century stuck the 'b' back in. There it has stayed but nobody has ever pronounced it.
@Enoch
Thanks. It sounds as if 1066 might not be quite the clean dividing-line between Anglo-Saxon and Latin that it is sometimes assumed.
re: "beef" and "bovine" for example, I wonder what happened during or around the Tudor era that made more of the general public familiar with the more purely Latin phrases. Ecclesiastical reforms that made the Latin more commonly known?
Beef/beof/bovus is an interesting one - Scottish Gaelic has bò, which I assumed was derived from Latin but is apparently from further back in the proto-Indo-European family tree, the same from from which comes bovus et al. In turns out that this specific form is shared with one other language... (drumroll) Vietnamese.
Latin continued to be the learned language until as late as the nineteenth century. Robert Lowth Bishop of London and Oxford Professor of Poetry in the mid-eighteenth century wrote his seminal works on Hebrew poetry in Latin. It was only about fifty years later that somebody else (not him!) translated them into English. He also, incidentally, wrote a text book, widely respected and used at the time, on English grammar and usage, advocating a lot of the foibles still maintained today about English grammar, 'correcting' English so as to make it more like Latin. He wrote that in English.
There was some of this earlier but it was particularly between the sixteenth century (Tudors) and the nineteenth century that scholars and others plundered Latin and later Greek to make up shortfalls in English for suitably learned terms.
Yeah, I know Latin was never the everyday language of England. But even today, average people in the anglosphere use Latin or near-Latin words and phrases in conversation, and I was just wondering when that got going.
Thanks for the history. I'd imagine that expanded education put people more in touch with texts containing Latin phrases, if not the overall language itself. See @Arethosemyfeet's speculation about "the rise of academia".
Most Latin loans into English are either very old - Wine, cheese, ecclesiastical - Bishop, Cathedral, or post-renaissance learned loans. The very old ones are everyday things that the Germanic tribes got from the Romans and are frequently far from obviously Latin (I had to to double check that "cheese" wasn't a cognate rather than a borrowing). The biggest group of regularly used Latin origin words in English is, I suspect, the Norman French corpus.