how did words such as s— and f— originate and who decided they were bad? where’s the line between “poopy”, “crap”, and “s—”?.
my sister’s eleventh grade history teacher said there was a group of people called vulgarians (hence the word “vulgar”) who were hated by other people (kinda like the samaritans were in the new testament) for some reason who used these words as an ordinary part of their language; so the language itself was hated. but i’ve been told that’s just a myth. if that’s not true, what is?
In general, the “dirty” words were originally just a way to describe something; most are very old. “Arse,” for instance, was just a word describing a part of the body.
However, these words usually described things that people didn’t want to talk about. It was partly a class distinction – if you said “arse,” you were looked down upon as being vulgar (even though it was a perfectly good English word). And after the Norman Invasion, the French aristocrats looked down upon the English-speaking commoners and looked down upon anyone who used them. They might have called the people “vulgarians,” but they were really just nonmembers of the aristocratic class, so the aristocrats showed great disdain for them and their language.
Other words in this area came later (including the “F” word) and were taboo because they described things that were taboo – usually sex. Again, it was a class issue.
I’m not sure whether the teacher’s explanation got garbled by the students repeating it, or whether the teacher ought to stick to some other topic, but that story is simply odd.
Vulgar is simply the English variation of the Latin word meaning common. In any society that is arranged into classes (which is pretty much any large society), there will be people in the “upper” classes who disparage the people of the “lower” (or common) classes. Occasionally, the effort of the “upper” classes to distance themselves from the “lower” classes will result in assigning values of quality to certain words. Thus, in English, some words that are used by “common” (a.k.a. vulgar) people will come to be considered taboo among groups that consider themselves above the common or vulgar classes. Eventually, of course, (and it really does not take too long), the “lower” classes pick up on these shibboleths* and they also relegate those words to the category of rude words.
There was never a specific subset of society known as the vulgarians–vulgar is simply the name given to the people near the bottom of the social ladder. (This is not to say that no one anywhere actually identified a group as “vulgarians,” only that such a group would have been mockingly identified that way long after the word vulgar had been applied to the “lower” classes and very long after various words had been relegated to the category of words that one does not say in polite company.)
Shibboleth was the password used by Gileadites to identify their foes, the Ephraimites in the story in Judges 12. The Ephraimites dialect turned shibboleth into sibboleth and so they did not pronounce the word “correctly” to the ears of their enemies the Gileadites. The word has come to mean any word that separates one group from another by pronunciation or usage. A person who says “I need to take a shit” is thus identified as being of a vulgar background, and may be shunned in “polite” society.
Slightly off-topic, since it doesn’t concern profanity in particular, but there is a discussion of class-based distinctions in speech in the thread Diglossia?