WARNING: This post contains bad words.
There are several types of language generally considered offensive: Profanity, swearing, cursing, and in the western world, using God's name in vain. The question here is why are any of them offensive.
Swearing and cursing are terms generally synonymous with saying bad words and that is the emphasis of this post. Profanity and using God's name in vain is not really part of this post, though it is interesting that many Christians seem more concerned with the word fuck that with saying "oh my god." Technically, of course, "God" is not the name of the Abrahamic god (that of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). But that is a different subject.
So on to bad words. Why are they offensive? Words, of course, are our primary means of communication. Body language, facial expressions, and the arts are all arguably communication, but if you really want someone to understand, you tell them. (There is a whole rant that could go along with this.)
Presumably, if we say something is a bad word then we are indicating that there is something offensive in their communication. Something about their meaning is taken to be ... what? Insulting? Rude? Why?
Often we take technical words, such as feces, and replace them with words that somehow seem less embarrassing, such as poop. For reasons unknown, however, words like crap and shit are deemed offensive. For the life of me, I don't understand why. Feces, poop, shit, scheisse, merde, et al., are refer to the solid waste product that our bodies and that of other animals produce.
It is notable that we don't seem to be offended if people use bad words in other languages. In the preceding paragraph, scheisse is German for shit as is merde in French.
A story a former employer told was that they had a Chinese co-worker who would sit at his keyboard programming all day long. All day long he would mutter to himself, "fuck". Finally, apparently amused, my former employer asked him what the Chinese equivalent was. His response: "Oooh, very bad word!"
My point here is mostly this: Any word is a sequence of sounds and cannot be offensive by themselves. A word is offensive because we deem it such. Also, if there is an equivalent word that is not offensive, then the 'slang' term should not be offensive nor censored. Shit should not be anymore offensive than feces.
Intent goes a long way to explaining our reactions to such things. If someone calls my mother a cunt, I am offended. Why? Because the speaker intends me or my mother to be offended. Somehow the speech would carry less weight if the speaker called my mother a vagina. If someone calls this essay shit, it isn't the brown stuff that makes this statement offensive, but that they don't find value in what I've written.
I wouldn't want to discourage the ability to express our displeasure with life or circumstances. In some cases, it would seem that profanity helps. See this article. But I think that taking offense merely from overhearing words that others speak especially when not directed at oneself is just silly. Fuck that.
It's always funny to me when someone on TV says "God Damned" and then the censors bleep out the word "God" as being the word that makes that phrase *offensive*.
ReplyDeleteSeriously - who else could one possibly be talking about when referring to something as "damned"?
Indeed. Rhetorical though that question is, I gave it some thought. Who indeed? I thought first that it would be reasonable to suppose that someone might that something be damned rather than express that God had condemned it. But then who would we be wishing would do the damning? It has to be God.
ReplyDeleteNow a government can condemn a house so a road can go through and can condemn a person to some sort of sentence (3 years in the pen.). But no one means that when they say a "bad" word. So if they mean anything at all, they mean God.
But that is part of the problem: inferring meaning where there is none. When someone shouts "Fuck", are they talking about sex in anyway whatsoever? I'd say no. Sometimes damn simply means "I am unhappy about X". At other times, it could mean "That is one fine looking specimen of the gender I find attractive." I.e., neither expression has anything to do with the actual meaning of damn.
Perceived intent is the weight behind all words, I'd say. It's what makes the difference between being called a "piece of shit" and "the shit." Either way, one is apparently feces but one is meant to insult while the other to adulate.
ReplyDeleteSomeone I can't remember expressed that meaning emerges not from the speaker but in the listener's mind. So, when one gets angry at words, it's because of the meaning and intent we've perceived from the words. That is not to say that we necessarily can make a conscious decision about whether to take offense or not. For instance, I've been called "Mexican" before as a derogatory term when I was in high school, but it I didn't get angry because I didn't understand that this was meant as an insult until much later, at which point I did get a little upset.