I think that the period we're in right now is also a very similar watershed. What used to be quite 'powerful' swear words such as 'fuck' and shit' are now just a normal part of informal speech, that don't carry any actual taboo. We have now developed a new set of very real actually culturally taboo "curse words".
These new curse words are in fact so taboo that the most powerful of them cannot even be uttered in a context of explaining that someone else said them, and can only be referenced in an oblique manner such as 'he said the N-word' or 'they uttered a homophobic slur'
Those aren't curse words, they are slurs. Curse words are just verbal punctuation marks used for emphasis. 'Fuck' and 'shit' never carried the element of hate that slur words do.
I think the fact that you feel that way shows how much our culture has lost its taboos around its traditional curse words.
I think maybe an easier example to consider would to be to put 'fuck' and 'shit' aside (since its even harder to understand how these were ever really taboo), and instead consider the older more religiously inspired curses like 'damn it', 'blood the mary', etc.
These curses (in certain circles) were hugely taboo because in the worldview of the times, they were deeply harmful to use on a metaphysical / spiritual level. You were doing real harm in the world by exclaiming "damn it to hell!" or telling someone "go to hell!".
This is perhaps hard for us in our current culture where even even amongst people who claim to be religious, almost everyone would just view those as empty words, but I do think there's a real case to be made that our ancestors would have understood such curses in a very similar way to the way we understand and treat slurs today.
- He may be forgiving but that doesn’t mean you ought to disrespect Him. My family is forgiving but I oughtn’t say nasty things about them.
- Forgiveness is open to all and unlimited, but requires repentance, which involves resolution to work to do better.
- It takes lightly what is in and of itself a holy act of creation, treating casually an integral part of God’s design for us, talking as though it’s something foul to cuss with.
Why should God have mercy on someone who offends him, night and day, and does not care, nor show any remorse for his actions? Mercy requires repentance; no repentance, no mercy.
"And his master, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he would repay all that was owed him." - Matthew 18:34
Edit, as a reply for the comment below about how this is a "small breeze to a great mountain": to claim this is to reject the words of Christ.
"But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall render an account for it in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." - Matthew 12:36-37
Are not all possible words a small breeze before an infinite God?
As God, simple words like this would be like a small breeze to a great mountain. As I said, to be offended by this would require pettiness which I would have a hard time believing would be possible for such. As a human believer, I think you are speaking outside of your bounds of understanding.
To your edit, you are still making an assumption of pettiness on the part of God. These "swear" words are nothing but wind. They have no impact on the world. If God is invested in the world, then is probable that only those words, idle or not, that made a positive or negative impact on the world would be worthwhile to judge with any weight. So-called "idle" words may have been mentioned simply to cast an umbrella over all speech, due to an incomplete recollection of what the Christ figure had once said about speech. Like most attributions in the new testament, it is a second hand account of what had been said a decent while before.
>> I doubt anyone so wise would be so petty.
>> Why should God have mercy on someone who offends him, night and day, and does not care, nor show any remorse for his actions? Mercy requires repentance; no repentance, no mercy.
Because in order to think, you must risk being offensive.
That's why the snake was wisdom, and God is literally, figuratively, collectively unconsciously and historically in our Gaps.
Newton claimed only Jesus knew what made the leaves green.
Jesus died on the cross to clear all our sins. Heaven’s door is open to all who just want to enter. Says uneducated me of course, but I damn sure like that Jesus and God. Confident, forgiving and cavalier.
Hear hear. Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
Nah. Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
Setting aside the truth value of any religious claim — I find ‘Jesus **** Christ’ to be in gratingly poor taste. Imagine going around saying ‘Prophet **** Muhammed’ or even ‘Martin **** Luther King.’ It’s gauche.
I mean stuff like "Bud fucking dha" wouldn't exactly roll of the tongue but I get what you generally mean about e.g. Muslims still taking a much more strict view of blasphemy in current times. My understanding of Buddhism (which could be wrong) is it's more that blasphemy isn't an "extreme" type of thing to exclaim in the first place.
It'd be 'Siddhartha fucking Buddha' if we're talking about the Buddha. There are other Buddhas whose moniker you could use (e.g. Amithaba), and Siddhartha Gautama had other monikers (Shakyamuni Buddha), so variations would be possible. As for the stance on blasphemy, I'm not certain but I expect it may differ between sects.
Just to clear up a possible misunderstanding, the word church in the bible is derived from a word that simply meant assembly, as in an assembly of people. The above poster was referring to the institution of the church, which wasn't formalized till long after the death of the Christ figure.
All you have to do is read Eusebius to find that the church existed long before Constantine, and as a formal structure. You can also read the Early Church Fathers to find that the Bishop of Rome was respected as the leader even before Christianity was legalized.
A curiosity about GDI - what if the thing already sucks because 'god' has in fact damned it? That is, if someone believes it to be a statement of fact (spin on the phrase) rather than somehow compelling a mystical spirit to curse something.
It wasn’t considered to be transgressive in the same way. If you said something was damned by God, that was a serious statement but not particularly blasphemous. If you used something sacred casually to express displeasure or frustration, it is.
The development of phrases like "g-- damn it" is interesting to me. I think its recent increase in use (especially in the media) and seemingly social acceptance is normal as cultures become increasingly secular. However, slurs against religious groups, especially certain monotheistic ones, seem even more taboo now than in the past. Perhaps a result of giving more power to identity in the current culture.
To your point, I know groups who would find the slur less offensive than "g-- damn it."
A curse word is a word used to curse somebody. Cursing, as in wishing ill upon someone, or delivering ill fate through magic. Hate is pretty much required for it to be an effective curse, I would think.
> I think that the period we're in right now is also a very similar watershed.
I think you’re right.
In the article, they mentioned that words denigrating the holy or sacred were the most offensive while in more recent times the most offensive words became words referring bodily functions, sex, etc. But now as you suggest, the most taboo words in the English language are slurs denigrating entire groups like various ethnic groups, religious groups, women and the elderly.
Even when Alan Pardew (and I take great pleasure in being the first to mention his name in this forum) called opposing soccer manager Manuel Pellegrini "a fucking old cunt" it wasn't perceived as a slur on his elderlyness. It was the cunt bit that got him in trouble - and, even then, not that much.
Middle age is 45 to 65, and Old age can perhaps be thought of as the following three ten year periods: Go, Go-slow, No-go - that would make elderly as 75+
(Rationale being retirement planning advisors encourage people to make the most of those first ten years (65 to 75) to do bucket-list things while (usually) they still can)
Tbf, streamers, kids etc constantly call people in their thirties boomer.
I feel like it's becoming a word describing people that have passed their prime (~35+ yo).
Yes, I'm fully aware that the word initially described people that were born during the baby boomer years (~1950) and that the people that are currently 35yo are millennials.
I am 35 and I was called a boomer by some youngling colleagues. I laughed like a true boomer full of sneer that those younglings are all a bunch of lazy losers that will not amount to anything as great as me all their life. I am pretty sure the generation before me thought the same and so on. It is great!
In most western countries your 60s is when you start drawing an old age pension. The post ww2 boom started when people got home so births from about 1946. Those people have been drawing US social security for over a decade.
Depends on the context and social circle, like lots of post-slang terms for a class. It can be endearing (or endearing and patronizing), a general insult, a common adjective…
Some words imply the person you're insulting is unsavory. Some words imply "I have power over you such that I can do anything I want and you can't stop me."
The degree to which this violence is allowed in a culture also conveys the power of the word in play.
> What used to be quite 'powerful' swear words such as 'fuck' and shit' are now just a normal part of informal speech, that don't carry any actual taboo.
Maybe in some social circles, but in most circles I run in, saying "fuck" is still considered quite offensive.
Is it considered to be offensive though, or is it just a breach of protocol? I don't doubt that there are social circles where it's truly a noxiously offensive word, but in much much more circles, it's just improper or inappropriate to say, which is very different.
In the Mormon culture, it is definitely offensive, not just a protocol breach. If you consider what FCC rules were in place for the 60s and 70s, that will give you a pretty good guage for what's appropriate for Mormons.
I am not aware of social circles nowadays where words like "fuck" and "shit" are worse than racial slurs. Even when racial slurs are accepted they are still usually considered stronger words than "fuck".
There are absolutely racist evangelical christian circles where saying "fuck" will you get you a stern reproach but using the "hard R" when talking about black people is not worthy of note.
> The N-word has been reclaimed by people of color, but remains taboo for others to say.
The "N-word" was never reclaimed by black people, we always said it, and it always means something different than when said by a non-black person (and there was never a "hard-r" or a "soft-r," that's just a mockery of black dialects.) It's like the word "bitch." If a woman calls another woman a "bitch," she's obviously not demeaning her for being a women.
Also, the "N-word" was not a swear word for non-black people. It was a word to demean black people, who were demeaned by consensus by the majority of the population of the Anglo-American world. It was also used for any dark-skinned person that they didn't think of as fully human, as it was the prevailing slur during the US-Philippine War.
The "N-word" has become a swear word for non-black people because the consensus about black people has changed for the moment, and using it indicates a particular political position on race. It has been a perennial issue for non-black people to complain about because white people want a place in the oppression olympics, and it's really hard to find something that they've ever been officially restricted from doing.
This is a best-of comment, and I'm glad I waded through the rest of the dreck in the thread to find it. Thank you.
[Edit] Thinking through your final paragraph a bit more, there are "oppressions" (and I'm putting that in scare-quotes, because I think it's too strong a word; I'd say something like "prejudices" or "restricted opportunities") which some (USA) white people accurately perceive being applied to them. Those are based around class markers (think: what schools someone went to, what accent they have, what body-type they are), not race. Accurately understanding that would require / create an entirely different sociological paradigm.
I don’t think bitch is an appropriate parallel because I hear women use it in both insulting and friendly senses. And while I think a word being taboo for some but not others is silly, it doesn’t constitute oppression. For instance, I don’t think you should cancel some kid for singing along to his favorite rap song.
Regardless, I think using either word is in poor taste.
We're on the internet, anonymously discussing swear words, you can just type out nigger.
There's still large segments of the internet not subject to hysterical brigades of thought police demanding every typed word be cross referenced with the ever-growing Manual of Self-Censorship and Conformity with Whoever Is Offended In The Loudest Manner.
Because there are insane people who will try to ruin your job and life over it, even if you use it in a factual, rather than personal, context.
Yesterday on twitter someone posted reddit screenshots of a ukrainian dude in a thread. He said he was voting for trump and his account was semi-public, and some absolute sociopath started sending screenshots of it to every university and internship program he could think of.
> even if you use it in a factual, rather than personal, context.
We all know that the 'factual context' is often used as cover by trolls. Whatever the excuse, people are not idiots.
Also, I'm not sure 'factual context' is a good idea - why say things that are upsetting to people? If my friend's mother just died, I don't talk about death 'in a factual, rather than personal, context'. In general, I don't describe, e.g., torture 'in a factual context'; it's not nice.
Sure, I’m not saying trolls don’t try to cover it up. I don’t see any particular issue calling them out for it. That doesn’t mean there aren’t also bad-faith nutcases who can and will cause problems. The internet is a big place and there’s no test of basic sanity to log on, and few jobs or schools would want the reputational risk of defending even someone who was using a word in a factual discussion.
I don’t think there’s any virtue in using it when it upsets people. I also don’t think there’s virtue in refusing to use a word, even in discussions about that word. There’s a line of reasonability: using it to express hate can and should be frowned on. But substituting a euphemism in all contexts is excessive.
The person that comment referenced doesn't seem to be a troll and obviously wasn't writing in a hateful context. Ironically, the fact that he used a euphemism pretty much proves that.
The only requirement for shaping language and informal thought policing is a sufficiently malignant army of trolls then?
I'd rather have a wild jungle internet full of anonymous people saying nigger in every second sentence than one of voluntary gestapo thought police combing through post histories to dox and hound common people because they don't fulfill the "linguistic standards" imposed by a small group of ideological/political activists.
Those words are "taboo" because they convey a direct "you are property or worse and I can hurt you and you can't stop me" violent threat. At the moment, at least in some parts of the world, that _violence_ is what is taboo. Maybe some people don't understand the implicit meaning, but lots of people do, especially the ones who're threatened.
That article didn't discuss class / culture, so whatever a nobel who's threatening an underling might say, "peon" or whatever, wasn't mentioned. Elsewhere someone made the distinction between 'insult' and 'slur' which I think is a good way to distinguish vulgarity/insult from threat.
Most cuss words are more taboo for women to say than men, and somewhat accepted in male company (bars, locker rooms, cigar bars, etc.) than in mixed. At least that’s how it was, and closer to how it is where I live.
Is this uniformly true? Perhaps in parts of the internet, or perhaps amongst some social groups but not others. I live in a smaller center-right city in the south and they’re not used casually, though with more liberality than our grandparents might’ve done. Or by drunks, but drunks have always been prone to cussing.
By contrast, some of what you say is too offensive seems pretty common to me. It’s not polite, but you’re much more likely to hear someone use retard or faggot than drop an f-bomb. Maybe it’s just my social circle. I do notice people from other parts of the country are more like you say.
Fully agree. As a non-native English speaker, I always thought English doesn't have "real" curse words, and the only actual (taboo) curse words I know are so-called "n-word" and similar.
It's hard for me to explain the difference, but (as an educated and relatively eloquent person) I would really hesitate (as in, physically struggle with my throat) to curse in my language aloud in a public place. Saying them among my friends or family would be seen as between mildly offensive and absolutely unacceptable. When hearing someone curse in public, I instinctively assume they're uneducated or intoxicated.
Meanwhile, i can freely swear in English among the same people (and online, and in most situations abroad). My mother, who I have never heard curse in my language, says "shit" like it was "oh darn". I see English swear words everywhere online. They really don't feel like a taboo to me.
That's definitely true, but I think you're also likely also just not understanding that in some cultures, there really are taboo words that are not considered okay to say under really any context.
Again, think of how radioactive "the N-word" is in all but the most radical of english speaking circles nowadays. Other languages have things like this with different histories and reasons.
It's an extremely common pitfall for second language learners to swear too casually. You've been yelled at for swearing (or screwing up honorifics) in your own language, but that still hasn't happened to you enough in your second language. It will.
I've tutear'd people in what would be casual settings for Americans and really felt the chill instantly.
Mainly due to anonymity and lack of consequences. As the public becomes less and less tolerant of these words, pressure to moderate such behaviour has increased.
That stuff has been scrubbed out of text communication in multiplayer games for ages now, and I think it'll be forcibly removed from voice communication with increasing frequency soon.
It is right now, in a few games you can report people for using slurs in voice chat at which point it's saved for review. In some cases the reporter gets some kind of reward for actioned reports.
However, this is only in the largest games. Gaming is now one of if not the most valuable media industries out there and only growing, however there are still a lot of niche games where either for cultural or demand reasons there's zero interest in censorship. Go check Wargame Red Dragon global chat for instance.
Sure. But there's always been dark alleys where people freely said things that respectable memebers of society would lose their jobs for saying.
That doesn't mean that those words aren't curse words. In fact, it's a sign that they are curse words. It wouldn't be so edgy to say them if they weren't so heavily frowned upon by "polite society"
Oh to be clear I'm not arguing that they're not curse words at all, in fact the increased censorship in high profile spaces like popular video games is evidence they are curse words.
I've entertained this idea for some time, but I can't really see how they can develop into full blown general curse words. I have to consider that perhaps I'm now just part of the crowd that holds them as sacred, and that newer generations will start intelligently using them as swears and slowly grow their acceptance, but that still doesn't feel very compelling. I read this article trying to pull out any parallels to see what I might be missing, but still didn't get anything.
I think that kind of progression has actually run its course within the narrower contexts it has been able to - take back the word empowerment, etc. But breaking out into the general societal context seems impossible as long as those words still acutely hurt significant contingents of people, as most people don't want to casually engage in hurtful behavior.
Then again if America loses the election on Tuesday, perhaps society will just regress to the point where most people are just fine stoking group hatred (it's cheaper than bread or professional circuses, after all!), and "general" acceptance will happen that way. I still don't personally see myself taking part though, despite being otherwise quite enthusiastic about swearing.
> I've entertained this idea for some time, but I can't really see how they can develop into full blown general curse words.
I think what you mean by "full blown general curse words" is what I'd actually call "faded dying curse words" if what you mean is that it's something you could say in casual conversation without people thinking less of you.
By the point that a curse word is used for emphatic punctuation, it's because the people using it don't actually believe the word holds real power to do harm, it just carries residual power because of a cultural memory of a time where it was taboo to say the word.
So I think these slurs would only become part of a regular persons vocabulary of merely 'rude' words if regular people stopped thinking they were doing real harm by uttering them.
But there are still plenty of casual contexts where one can use traditional curse words, and they will still have an impact. Making people think less of you is not the main dynamic of curse words (and they don't have a monopoly on that either!). Rather cursing is about openly transgressing social mores to display some combination of exceptional emotion plus (not being beholden to) social status. It's basically saying "I'm going to reject this thing you care about."
So unless those words stop being routinely used for ignorant personal attacks, I don't see how swearing with racial slurs could become trendy for anybody but racists rejecting the idea that racism continues to be a problem. A decade ago I had more of an idealist post-racist outlook and could have believed that in a few more decades we'd be at the point where these words would have lost their deeply personal punch, with their only lingering effect being to cause pearl clutching (and who doesn't want to needle pearl clutchers?). But at this point that looks to be a pipe dream. Which is why I say it's a similar dynamic of words being off limits, but it's not actually the same. Some social mores have fundamental merit, believe it or not.
> What used to be quite 'powerful' swear words such as 'fuck' and shit' are now just a normal part of informal speech, that don't carry any actual taboo.
Those words would be socially disqualifying in many places I go, such as business meetings, most interactions with adults, most public interactions (for example, with a clerk at a store).
In most cases for most people, those would be socially disqualifying because it'd be breach of etiquette. You would be acting in a distasteful way that people find inappropriate.
Now compare that to how life altering it would be for you if you were dropping the 'N-word' in such situations. The difference is that people really do believe the 'N-word' has real power to do harm. It's not just a rude word, it's an 'evil' word (which is what curses used to be).
Uhm, there definitely are people who do that. There used to be a lot more of them but i think you just haven't been around the types of people who do that long enough to observe that behavior. There is still a rather large portion of some "backwaters" that use all the old words very much conversationally
Don't mistake reddit popularisation of "cunt" for reality. It's certainly used heavily by some subcultures, ex and current armed forces, young men. Mostly it's braggadocio and routine use in everyday conversations is not normal no matter what redditors say. It's a version of "drop bear" trapping for unwary visitors. It's extremely unacceptable to most people and is avoided.
Coon cheese changed its name to "Cheer" despite having no context where it's origin story related to its slang use. It's Edward Coon of Philadelphia's proprietary branding.
Slang words for aboriginal females have fallen out of use and were all highly derogatory along with most other objectifying language about the aborigines. Terms like murri and mob are self-referential use.
I was shocked by use of Yid 20 years ago. I think some people in Australia had little or no context of its use in Europe. Likewise Paki which is still used, to a British person from the era of the BNP and paki-bashing this word is anathema. Jap went from a term of derision to a term with probably positive meanings, jap cars are cheap, well made and reliable.
Chink was and remains abusive since the gold rush era and racist white Australia immigration policy. A nong has nothing to do with the N word, ningnong just means a stupid person. Mong is offensive everywhere.
For context, we're both talking about Australia here, right?
What's (IMHO) uniquely Australian is the slang adoption of "cunt" for men, sometimes in a positive sense (good cunt, mad cunt), sometimes negative (dog cunt, shit cunt). But, just like the US, you absolutely cannot use it to refer to a woman unless you intend to offend.
Yes. Australia. But, that usage remains highly contested as acceptable. It's been my experience that it's an emerging trend which is leveraging social media. It's like code switching, few people would do it in front of their wives, girlfriends, bosses or strangers. Whereas "fuck" is almost entirely normalised amongst the under 60s. My 80yo contacts still apologise when they say it.
"Being John Malkovitch" implied it was edgy arts scene in the US who used it. For me, it's been ex forces telecommunications technicians and .. younger bogans. This is why I think it's braggadocio: Used because it remains transgressive.
I don't really think they are. I almost only see it used on women (and gay men) in the US; it's just become more acceptable to publicly call women "cunts" lately. I think it's come from straight middle-class adoption of drag queen culture, which young people grew up with.
Not mentioned is the large, laaarge youth subculture, sometimes called the ‘alt crowd’, that it’s become popular as a positive term- but honestly it’s permeated into the mainstream for sometime already as well. Calling things cunty or saying someone looks “so cunt” or “so cunty” is a term of praise and endearment in basically any situation I can think of among 3-4 separate social circles I’m in. The cutoff is pretty quick- I’d say the proportion of people who would be taken heavily aback has a sharp uptick starting around 26-28 year olds.
It’s not just Reddit, it’s tiktok and Instagram, the main, or at least two extremely, inconceivably large propagaters of youth slang and culture.
Mong is the height of slurs - simultaneously racist and a reference to 'mongoloid', a cringeful historical term for Downs Syndrome. Hundreds of years of racial elitism distilled into a single syllable.
“Cunt” is not a particularly offensive word though. I think its a bit more taboo than bitch now, but I think its very common to use cunt/bitch/whore around women to signal a friendly/relaxed attitude.
Is this also true for French with a similar timeline, potentially explaining why Québecois - settled in the 1600s - primarily uses religious swear words?
There is a much wider range of swear words than just putain in French. And much more than in English in general which sounds like a poor language for insults to French ears.
Enlighten us! English is of course rather impoverished here. What does the wider range of cursing in French look like, in current use? Do people still say c'est con, ça and sacrebleu!? My own exposure to French cussing in real life has all been putain putain putain.
Is con even a cussword? Most of the translations are non-taboo insults referring to stupidity rather than to genitalia, with the exception of the Italian and the Argentine rajá, pobre pelotudo, which refers to different genitalia and is not taboo. (The Greek "shabby wanker” is maybe an exception?)
But there may be some selection bias involved in the translation sampling process; by definition, taboo words won't be printed in a major newspaper headline. If he had used a racial slur against Maghrebis, for example, the NYT surely would not run a headline containing the N-word.
Around here, people will say of actions or other people that they are stupid, but not con, so I get the impression it goes well beyond stupidity, into sheer bloody-mindedness.
(whether the latter rates cusswordedness I prefer to leave to L1 speakers)
Nah, "con" must have been a very bad word a few hundred years ago. The French people I grew up with used it like it was nothing. Much like "merde". Doesn't mean that you should be saying it willy nilly. I'm sure if you call a stranger a "con" they won't take it well -- you need some familiarity to do that.
"Espèce de con" ("some kind of cunt") is for when you mean it a bit more.
– C'est un imbécile..., lâcha le garçon.
– Non, c'est un con.
– C'est pareil.
M. Pelletier s'arrêta de jouer.
– Non, c'est pas pareil. Si tu expliques trois fois un truc
à quelqu'un et qu'il ne le comprend pas, c'est un imbécile.
Mais si, à la fin, il est certain de l'avoir compris mieux
que toi, alors, tu as affaire à un con. — (Pierre Lemaître,
Le Grand Monde, Calmann-Lévy, 2022, pages 20-21)
"Con" is very much a curse word, it's just that in French everyone is allowed to use "con" (and "conard"/"conne"/"conarde"/"conasse") and just about all cuss words. I remember my childhood French teachers using those words like it was nothing; kids too. French is a really crass language that everyone seems to think is beautiful. Well, it is beautiful, but it's also crass.
"Petit con" is "little shit". A French teacher might say that to a troublemaker student, say.
"Boludo" and "pelotudo" are just Argentine variants of "huevón" -- a big fat zero. They do not refer to genitalia. I know many people think that, but that's not their origin. And what, why should "ballsy" be a swear word? Of course it's not, not even in Argentina.
Similarly "weon" is Chilean for "huevón".
"Carajo", however, is an old word for "cock". "Conchudo" is basically "cunty". Etc.
Hmm, I thought boludo and pelotudo came from the idea that too-big testicles made a man stupid, perhaps related to coglione. There's also an urban legend that they come from improvised weapons used in the war of independence, adapted from livestock herding equipment.
But I'm trying to unpack the distinction here between insults and taboo words. Taboo words may not be insults; to use an outdated example, if I say that I'm going to the shitter, nobody is being insulted — probably not even the plumbing facility in question. Similarly if I am tired of waiting in line and exclaim "God damn it!" And insults may not be taboo words; if I say, "Your mother wears army boots," many people will take it as an insult, even though in English it contains no taboo words.
In that sense I think con is an insult, not taboo, because I've heard people say punaise (for putain) and nom de bleu (for nom de dieu) but I can't recall ever having heard a similar substitutions for con.
TIL that `false` is (was) a swear word. (I just hope the compliance checker for my source code doesn't start flagging it, as I'd hate to have to replace them all with `!true`... as that just makes the code read like flam-flam.
Had me puzzled for a moment as well. I guess its intended use is to describe a person? In German, a "false" person is a routinely dishonest person. (A little more nuanced than that, but I don't feel like writing an essay about it)
Zounds! Some of those 1600s usages still sound modern. "That flim-flam has me in a pickle" is something that could have come out of my mouth yesterday.
For those who can find it, Robert Graves's essay "Lars Porsena, Or the Future of Swearing" is worth a look. I think the collection that included it was Occupation, Writer.
Hi! I'm not from the US so I probably miss the cultural context. Are the words you listed considered offensive? With exception of maybe "xe", this seems more like a list of controversial topics, not words, which is a completely different thing. If I understood you correctly, I don't think it's relevant in context of the article posted.
They're worse than swear words in the United states, triggering people on the right and the left. Just look at the down votes. 50 years ago they would be considered harmless.
What distinguishes these from profanity is that the use of the words or phrases themselves are not taboo; promoting the ideas they represent may upset people, but neutral uses of the phrases do not.
As other commenters note, words like "shit" and "fuck" used to be much more taboo than they are now, while certain slurs have recently gained taboo status to the point that many people in the comments are referencing them without actually typing them in their comments.
The examples are stupid or the concept? I think it's a great argument, people 200 years from now will be scratching their heads wondering what's going on
> For what [the troll] indicates is known
to be ... ignorant; but he does not say that thing, but rather
something close. In this way he retains the possibility of denial, and the skilled troll
is always surprised and hurt, or seems to be, when the others take his comments
up.
No one hits their thumb with a hammer and yells "White Privilege!"
No but I'd wager you'd get as much attention yelling out the F word in a crowded room in the 1930's as you would yelling "Let's go Brandon" today. And isn't that the purpose of a swear word? To give you that extra out of band boost to give you some attention?
People use "fuck" or "fucking" to add emphasis to something even though some people might find the word impolite and a pearl-clutching conservative might take offense.
But "Let's Go Brandon" is intended to offend, and "China Virus" is racist. "DEI" is now being used as an insult to imply that someone is unqualified for their job and often blatantly ignores a massive list of qualifications. A woman or racial minority can't make mistakes on the job now, because people will crawl out of the shadows to scream "DEI hire! DEI hire!"
To put it bluntly, using those phrases in those ways kind of makes you a piece of garbage, and moderators are well within their right to take out the trash.
Maybe try to be a better person and you won't have to worry about getting downvoted and banned.
These new curse words are in fact so taboo that the most powerful of them cannot even be uttered in a context of explaining that someone else said them, and can only be referenced in an oblique manner such as 'he said the N-word' or 'they uttered a homophobic slur'