Have
you ever noticed many curses or profane words are four letters long?
Think
about it. What quickly comes to
mind?
Forgive my vulgarity, but this is a post about language and we can’t be afraid to use real words. Keep in mind they are all in the dictionary. If you guessed fuck, cock, tits, twat, shit, or cunt among others, you scored well.
Forgive my vulgarity, but this is a post about language and we can’t be afraid to use real words. Keep in mind they are all in the dictionary. If you guessed fuck, cock, tits, twat, shit, or cunt among others, you scored well.
So
what spurred our unfamily-like discussion here?
Well. I just read an insightful,
provocative, and powerful book. What
the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, And Ourselves,
penned by Benjamin K. Bergen (Basic Books).
The
history behind profanity extends back to the beginnings of language. It’s only natural that we have words that
offend us, because words reflect actions, feelings, and ideas – and some will
annoy, threaten, anger, or entertain us to different degrees. Comedians view language differently from the
clergy and kids speak differently than adults, but language exists for all to
use or abuse.
This
book attempts to take a deep dive into how and why we use curse words and how
attempts to ban them are futile. It examines the taboos of English, looking at things like a linguist, psychologist,
and neuroscientist, all wrapped into one, would.
Our
language is under fire by the PC police while at the same time social media
allows us unfettered access to spew all kinds of words across the globe, 24/7.
It
is amazing how words can trigger certain emotions, ideas, even actions. We have our fighting words, our terms of
endearments, our business speak, our political discourse (except for Trump),
our school conversations, and so on. The
right words for the right setting. Or is
that no longer the case? Should it even
be the case?
“Words,
in short, have the power by their mere utterance to affect how people feel and
how they feel about you,” writes Bergen.
“Being curse-less has consequences.
It affects the things you can do with the language – the work you can do
with words.”
His
book takes a serious turn when it examines whether words should be banned or
how such a thing could actually happen.
He concludes it should not and could not occur – but that doesn’t stop people
from trying often giving the hated words even more currency by the users.
Are
words really bad in themselves – or is it what a particular word represents that we hate
so much? We can't unthink things, can
we? We can’t cover up history,
right? Why do we try to go through life
as if we could live in a perfect world if only we eradicated all bad words? This just isn’t realistic or even an honest
approach to life.
Oddly,
the F-word ranked only No. 15 on a large study of most offensive words that was
cited in the book. The N-word was No. 1,
followed by the C-word. Whores tied for
No. 10, yet Hooker was No. 31. So what
should we conclude about words that offend?
1.
Most
relate to sex -- the act of, sexual organs, sexual preference – clit, slut, screw, dyke.
2.
Many
are terms of prejudice – kike, chink, spic.
3.
They
seek to put people down – moron, loser, retard.
This
means that regardless of what the word is, the intent behind it is to
ridicule, demean, express hate, and to shame others.
No matter what word you fill in the blank, there will always be people saying negative, threatening, ignorant things to another, so to focus on specific words is pointless. There’s nothing inherently evil above any one word -- only about how it’s applied and the intention of the use behind it.
No matter what word you fill in the blank, there will always be people saying negative, threatening, ignorant things to another, so to focus on specific words is pointless. There’s nothing inherently evil above any one word -- only about how it’s applied and the intention of the use behind it.
That
said, every single word on the list of offensive words could, under the right
circumstance, be acceptable to use, whether it’s used in jest or between
friends/lovers who choose to use the words differently than how they are
normally employed. At the very least,
for historical or legal purposes, we must use the actual words when discussing
events and not seek to sidestep them.
Our language, for better or worse, reflects who we are. We can’t ban humanity, can we?
Here are some selected excerpts from the
book:
Bad Language
“This
is a book about bad language. Not the
tepid pseudo-profanities like damn and boobs that punctuate broadcast
television. I mean the big hitters. Like fuck.... These words are vulgar. They’re shocking. They’re offensive. They’re hurtful.
“But
they’re also important. These are the
words people use to express the strongest human emotions – in moments of anger,
of fear, and of passion. They’re the
words with the greatest capacity to inflict emotional pain and incite violent
disagreement. They’re the words that
provoke the most repressive regulatory reactions from the state in the form of
censorship and legislation. In short,
bad words are powerful – emotionally, physiologically, psychologically, and
socially.
“And
that makes them worth trying to understand.”
Profanity Defined
“The
word profanity originally referred to the first group. In Latin profanus literally means
“outside the temple,” denoting words or acts that desecrate the holy. For some people, the use of religious words
in secular ways constitutes blasphemy – a sin against religious doctrine – and
this is the pathway that makes those terms taboo. The names of religious figures, like Jesus
Christ, Jehovah, or Mohammad, are easy fodder. So are aspects of religious dogma. In English, we have a few of these, like holy,
hell, God, damn, and, of course, Goddamn.”
Profanity -- Origins
“The second place English profanity comes
from is language relating to sex and sexual acts. This includes the acts themselves (fuck,
for instance), sex organs involved in those acts (pussy and cock),
people who perform those acts (cocksucker and motherfucker), and
artifacts and effluvia related to those acts (spooge, dildo, and so on). So the second prong of our profanity
principle is sex.
“Third is language involving other bodily
functions – things that come out of your body, the process of getting them out
of your body, and the parts of your body that they come out of. This includes robust cohorts of words
describing feces, urine, and vomit, among others, as well, of course, as the
body parts associated with these substances and the artifacts used in those
body parts; upkeep, like douchebag, and so on.
“And finally there are the slurs. Among the most offensive words on each of the
lists (when the lists saw fit to ask about them) are terms like (N-word),
faggot, retard, and the like. These
words are offensive by dint of their derogatory reference to people based on
some group that they’re perceived as belonging to, defined in terms of sex,
sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, and so on. New terms like this are developing all the
time - relatively recent additions to English include tard (from retard)
and sperg (derived from Asperger’s syndrome).”
Is Profanity Universal?
“In
what ways are the 7,000 languages of the world similar, and in what ways are
they different? Both questions have fascinated linguists and philosophers for
millennia, for different reasons. Universal
features found to hold in all languages reveal something about what it is to be
human. If all humans do something –
whether it’s art, music, math, or some aspect of language, that universal
behavior must be due to either some shared common experience or some trait
possessed by all humans, transcending cultural idiosyncrasies. Perhaps, sometimes, this stems from our
genetic endowment.
“There
doesn’t appear to be much about profanity that is truly universal – shared
without exception by all languages and cultures. It’s not just that the specific words are
different. As we’ve seen, the
differences are much deeper than that.
Some cultures have rich and deeply codified systems of profanity, like
English or Russian. Others, like
Japanese, don’t really have anything like the same category of words.”
Taboos
“But
trying to ban language is more than just ineffectual. The practice is actually its own worst
enemy. Here’s what I mean.
“We
know that taboo words aren’t taboo because they’re intrinsically bad. We’ve seen over the course of this book that
profane words are just words; they’re made up of sounds and enter into similar
(although not always identical) grammatical patterns to other words. There isn’t a fixed set of profanity in a
language – words meander into and out of taboo-ness. Over time, words move fluidly from banal to
profane and back again – think about the histories of cock and swive
(the now deceased, archaic predecessor to fuck). Nor is there anything
unique or defining about what taboo words mean; even if they tend to draw from
certain semantic domains, they can denote the very same things as mundane words like penis and copulate). And
in fact, a culture doesn’t even have to have taboo words if historical
vicissitudes haven’t conspired to give it any.
“In other words, there’s nothing deterministic about any particular
words having to be profane in any given language at any specific time.
“And
that means that our beliefs about profanity are largely a social
construct. The same word can provoke
radically different reactions in different cultures or at different times.”
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Brian Feinblum’s insightful views, provocative opinions, and
interesting ideas expressed in this terrific blog are his alone and not that of
his employer or anyone else. You can – and should -- follow him on Twitter
@theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels much more
important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by
BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2019. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in
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This was named one of the best book marketing blogs by Book Baby
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WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.” He recently hosted a panel on
book publicity for Book Expo America.
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