[ChemistCat]

Alex Nabaum, Deseret Morning News

Put me in the stubbed-toe-violation category. I'll be working on it!

My spouse claims that he doesn't think cr*p is or ever has been a bad word, but I bet he never used it around his grandma.

[Non-Sequitur]

Profanity is the crutch of the conversational cripple.

[stuartcr]

Aren't they all really just words? Sticks and stones, etc....

[Jonx6]

I remember Dr. J. Vernon McGee saying crap on the radio. "And may I say to ya, that's a bunch on crap!
I don't find it offensive. It’s just like the words feces or excrement, IMO.

[joesnuffy]

But Omary doesn't agree. If a person becomes desensitized to the f-word, she says, it means becoming desensitized to the disrespect she believes it embodies.

Given the current rate of rape, STDs, and pregnancy...she may just have a point.

[El Gran Salseron]

Well, F*** the author of this column. She S***s. :-)

[southernnorthcarolina]

It's not just curse words, of course -- words of all types are constantly being "devalued" to the extent that new words must be invented to convey the original sense intended.

For example, awful once meant, and in fact is still defined in my dictionary (among other definitions) as filling one with terror or dread or worthy of solomn respect. Most contemporary use of the word, however, is in a much more trivial framework, as in "that was an awful cup of coffee."

Mary Poppins' word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious will probably soon mean not bad.

[Agnes Heep]

Casual vulgarity simply isn't pleasant, which, I think, is why people use it with such alarming frequency. To my mind it's like sitting down to a formal dinner and finding a dehydrated lump of dog feces on the table.

[nicollo]

I like this line:

"Can you imagine Mother Teresa saying, 'Hey, that really sucks, I am so pissed off,'" Johnson asks.

Gonna use it with my kids.

"Son of a gun" used to be an "awful" expression. It was a reference to the locale in which a bastard child's life was conceived, the gun decks of ships at port. S.O.B. took over, but that's lost it's edge, too. I mean, here's a clear case of the democratization of words: so many S.O.B.'s out there these days...

My kids' mother let them buy the PG-version of an Eminem album. It was ridiculous, reminded of a most sublime free speech protest from 1924, a little book called "Mother Goose - Censored," and went like this:

Old Mother Goose, when
She wanted to ________
Would _______a fat goose
Or a very fine gander.

or

Jacke and Jill went up the hill
To ______________________;
Jack fell down adn broke his ______,
And Jill came tumbling after.

And so on, through all the nursery rhymes.

So I bought the kids the uncut Eminem, and told them, "Don't you dare use these words yourself." My son took to repeating the bad words with their more, uh, formal versions, "excrement!" "Fornication!" etc. It's funny!

Now, if I can just remove "this" and "like" from their vocabulary....

Nicollo unmasked: Bromleyisms here

[Tall_Texan]

Society is replacing those swear words with new ones like "ultraconservative", "Christian", "prolife", "right-wing"...

Soon, those will be said in the same vein we used to hear "nigger", "spic", "kike", "whore"...

[Tredge]

"We're wearing these things out very quickly, and you can't just make these things up. An entire culture has to agree that a word means something, that it has an aura and a gravitas, and that takes generations."

That's great, now even "f**k" has this "gravitas" thing. I infer that back in the 2000 campaign if GW Bush really wanted to bolster his Gravitas Quotient someone should have told him to pepper his speeches with the f-word.

Much is made here and elsewhere about parents' roles in teaching their children the skills and values they'll need in life later on, but I've never read anything about grandparents' roles in the process. In my case, my grandfather (an oil tanker captain) taught me that profanity, while being a valid tool in communication, is like the paintbrush to the painter - one requires training and talent to employ it artfully. His most important lessons were taught to me while on the golf course - it was there I learned that if one truly wishes to be a vulgarian he must have the temperment of the artist.

Reflecting on the education he gave me, I never understood why some people would be so artless in their use of our culture's treasured four-lettered words. It's akin to crying wolf when every other word is f-this and f-that. What will they do when the situation arises when the f-word is truly called for, and it needs to carry a punch? They have no go-to option, because they've all but worn out their vocabulary. Listeners will remark "Oh, he's just saying 'f**k', but he doesn't really mean it - he says that all the time." Innocent blood may be spilled while he lamely fumbles for a substitute to "f**k" where none exists - it has been the best our culture can do. For these people I feel truly sorry they didn't have the upbringing that I did.

[winker]

Rules of etiquette mean nothing to cretins! The shock and awe of gutteral language that goes against conventional norms, frames the person's ignorance.

Take the rules of this forum for example! It is expressly noted that no profanity,gutteral language,racial slurs or any un-savory language is allowed, yet the moderators always seem to allow deviation of these establised rules. I have called and made reference on numerous occasions about this growing problem in our nation and socially astute people are in high awareness of the slackness in applying and regulating what gets out on this forum.

This growing national experiential phenomen grows ever more present in the liberated environment of modern America, so the moderators on forums where this violates the established rules must be quick to delete the objectional material before it gets posted otherwise they themselves become part of the problem by allowing it to linger. Your challenge is still before you and unfortunately always will be!

[azcap]

Language that offends traditional morality is OK to today. You can thel the teacher to F*** Off. Language that offends political special interests is forbidden and punished harshley. Call the teacher a Fa**ot and you will be expelled. Call soeone at work a Bas***d - that's fine. Call someone a c**t you will be unemployed.

[Gal.5:1]

My neighbor was a hippie type in the 'glorious 60's' here in the SF area. He's around 60 years old now and every time he chats with me he uses the phrase " it looks like s---!" to describe, say, another neighbor's dry lawn. His conversation is peppered with this word, and also J-C- used as a swear word.

Gee, it is so nice to look up to the older generation for inspiration and guidance in matters of culture and manners.

[Savage Beast]

Often, cursing in movie dialogues is so inappropriate that it becomes distracting and irritating, like getting the accent wrong.

[Marie]

I'd swear much less if there were no liberals.

[mongrel]

Crap comes from Thomas Crapper, a toilet manufacturer in England at the turn of the century. His toilets had Crapper written in bold on the tanks. American GI's in WWI picked up the word as slang for toilet, and crap for what was put in it. In time the word gained then lost its vulgarity.

It is a lie that vulgarity is not renewable. New words are developed based on what a society considers "holy." Right now racial tolerance is probably the holiest thing, and so racial slurs are the vulgarities. For most of history it has been religion along with spiritual life. Thus the words for God and the base functions of the body became the objectionables.

[aruanan]

Our sensitivity about 'curse' words has changed with the times

So much so that barely anyone is even aware of what a curse is. For instance, calling Clinton an SOB is not an example of cursing; but stating "May his member shrivel and fall off" is.

[aruanan]

Put me in the stubbed-toe-violation category. I'll be working on it!

You should have heard me when I reached for the vacuum line and hit the end of the 21 gauge needle in between my middle and ring fingers.

[Wozzeck401]

I hope not being too off-topic, but there are some curiosities about the way we brazilians use curse words that will add some information to this discussion.

First of all, I realize there's a very basic diference between the way we Portuguese speakers use bad-words from the way you English Speakers do. Our way of offending other people is ever, or almost ever, from a sexual poit of view, while in English (and in german too, I guess) there's a lot of reference to feces and excrements.
One example could be a sentence that I found quite often in movies : "Hey, kiss my a** !". I suppose the point in this statement is a kind of humiliation for the person who is to perform the kiss, in a part of the body so close to the feces or excrements. But here in Brazil the translators that work in the subtitles for the movies seem unconfortable with this, becouse for us, and our cultural sexual point of view, it sounds like a homosexual invitation, not as an offense at all.
Another example is to call somebody a "brown nose", here we'd call this kind of person a "puxa-saco" or a "balls-puller", from the most sexual point of view possible.

The only reference to excrements I can remember happens when something goes very wrong, like to hit a finger with a hammer, and most of us would shout "merda!", very like the french, that is "sh*t!". But we could hear also a lot of "Puta que pariu!", that is a kind of "whore that has gave birth to!" (gave birth to the hammer, in this case) or "que buceta!", (what a vagina!).

The teenagers from here use to curse all the time too, and the most commom is "a fuder!", (good to f**k), "do caralho!" or "bom pra cacete!" (from the pennis, or good to the pennis), all used as an adjective meaning "very good, or cool". They use a lot of "vai te fuder!" too, that is very like your "Go f**k yourself!". Also there's the "Aqui oh!"(here!), that is complemented by a gesture pointing to your own genitals, or the big finger of the hand, sugesting an invitation to the offended to perform felation with the ofender.

Living in a place with a lot of Italian imigration, we used to hear the older people use religious words and sentences to curse when they were really angry. It was common to hear somebody shouting "Puta Madonna!"(Whore Virgen Mary!), "Porco Dio!"(Pig God!), and some less profano like "Sacramento!"(Sacrament), "Ostia!"(Host, holy bread !). These statements were ever very, very loud and pronunced, in a good Italian fashion. Today even the younger use this way to curse, but in a quite "funny" way, just to mimic the tradition of olders.

This account just to the very south of Brazil, and I should say that we are one of the states that use these bad word the less. Even teens know they are being wrong when saying that close to the olders, or women, and most of them respect, or at least be quite embarrassed. More to the North, like Rio de Janeiro, the commom people is very offensive, IMO, and the streets and schools are much more "dirty" from the bad-speaking point o view.

While writing these lines, I realized that all these words don't have a real meaning, and the proof is that when making the tranlations, when we are obligated to consider the meaning, everything loses sense or sound very un-natural. I find that's why more and more people use these bad words, becouse they are becoming just sounds, quasi non-semantic sounds, that just express rage or anything else.

Forgive my eventual spell errors :)

Wozzeck