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Pastimes : SI Grammar and Spelling Lab
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From: TimF8/5/2022 3:18:10 PM
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georgemonck
· 18 days ago · edited 18 days ago
Hearing her act as if curse words was a meaningful category was so funny to me, and I tried to explain to her how curse words is just a subjective phenomenon, citing how all my activist friends simply define a different set of words to be unsayable.
It is interesting how the concept of "curse", "swears" and "profane" language have all been mashed together.

Traditionally, they would be defined as follows (and all of these have been described as sins in the Christian tradition):

Curse -- wishing evil on another person. "Burn in hell", "Damn you"

Swear -- taking an oath in the name of God for some vain reason: "I swear to God I will smack you if you don't shut up about that stupid TV show"

Profane language -- treat (something sacred) with irreverence or disrespect. "God's wounds, that's a fat person!" "Oh my God, I can't believe she wore that!" "Jesus Christ, I can't believe my car just broke again."

Vulgarity -- using language about private bodily functions or body parts outside of an appropriate context. "You are a poopy head." "Fuck off." "Check this shit out." "You dick." "He sucks."

Defamation / fighting words / insults -- "you bastard" or "you bitch"

But you are right that there are some interesting arbitrary distinctions about the naughtiness of a word, such as between "poop" and "shit" or "bum" and "ass." Would be interesting to lookup the origins of how these split into a children's word and adult vulgar word.

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PutAHelmetOn
· 18 days ago

Recovering Quokka
I've heard that the etymologies can be traced back class.

For non-swearing example, "beef" "poultry" "pork" refer to meats because the French nobility would eat the meat but not work with the animals. Beouf really is just french for cow. We inherited the English underclass terms for the animals though: cow, chicken, and the like...

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