# Does it matter to society if language is cruder or fashion less formal? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 7, 2026, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473 "2026-02-07T17:40:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Sitnam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2026, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/41 "2026-02-12T18:15:37Z")
What strikes me about American Civil War letters is their formality and elegant poetry. Before texting you had perhaps one chance to get your meaning across and it was going to be perhaps months before you’d receive a reply. That is if you could read and write or find someone to do it for you. Anyone in that position and with those scant resource thinks hard about what they’ll say. My young teenager has all the feelings of those young men and is far more educated, but his atrocious handwriting is a product of his era. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2026, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/42 "2026-02-12T20:14:16Z")
> [@Spice\_Weasel](#): > > Last night my husband told him that he (my husband) needed to change into more comfortable clothes. > > Son: “Why are you even wearing those clothes if you’re not comfortable? You should only wear comfortable clothes.” Well, I like wearing sweatpants around the house, plus Carhartt T-shirts. If I go out I wear cargo pants with shorts, as the pockets in sweats arent secure enough for wallet and keys. So there is a reason to change when i get home. Mind you my cargo pants are pretty comfortable, but not as much as sweatpants. I still wear the Carhartt out, of course. (unless it is cold, in which case, sure something warmer- sometimes a Smartwool top under the Carhartt. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2026, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/43 "2026-02-12T20:24:15Z")
I feel that some people want short cuts when evaluating others. So instead of judging someone by the content of their character, they want to use their skin color, or their clothes, or their religion, or their speech, or their handwriting, or etc, etc. So many ways to judge someone on some superficiality instead of what matters. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2026, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/44 "2026-02-12T21:23:09Z")
Another thing I’ll add here, dress is a very regional thing. I grew up in Michigan, lived in New Jersey, worked in NYC, and then lived briefly in Florida. Florida had a _strikingly_ relaxed dress code relative to these other places. NYC was the fanciest. In Florida people would have business meetings wearing sandals. It really varies a lot depending on where you live. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2026, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/45 "2026-02-12T21:29:39Z")
The HBO show _Deadwood_ was famous for its profanity, especially the way Ian McShane would say the word “cocksucker.” This was absolutely ahistoric: in reality, a foul-mouthed saloon-owner would have used words like “Damn” and “Hell,” which were considered extremely strong swears during a time when people took blasphemy a lot more seriously. But if they wrote his character accurately, nobody would get that he’s being really explosively profane. Now words like “fuck” and “shit” are rapidly losing their sense of inappropriateness, but there’s a whole new class of terms that are just as verboten as “fuck” was in recent memory, or “damn” was before that: “gay,” or “retarded” as pejoratives, or “Jew” in phrases like “jew them down,” and so forth. We still have a class of words that aren’t meant to be used in “polite” society, we’ve just changed what we consider polite or impolite. Interestingly, “cocksucker” is still on the list, just for different reasons. ---
**Author:** ![Dung\_Beetle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dung_beetle/32/7945_2.png) [@Dung\_Beetle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dung_Beetle)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2026, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/46 "2026-02-12T21:37:26Z")
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2026, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/47 "2026-02-12T21:39:26Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > Now words like “fuck” and “shit” are rapidly losing their sense of inappropriateness, but there’s a whole new class of terms that are just as verboten as “fuck” was in recent memory, or “damn” was before that: “gay,” or “retarded” as pejoratives, or “Jew” in phrases like “jew them down,” and so forth. We still have a class of words that aren’t meant to be used in “polite” society, we’ve just changed what we consider polite or impolite. But there’s a crucial difference that lingers all over this thread: everybody who says “damn”, “hell,” “fuck”, “shit “or something like that may be insulting, or maybe just letting steam off, but they don’t discriminate against whole groups, while terms like “gay”, “retarded”, “jew down” or “gyp” certainly do. These terms are not really swear words, they are discriminating language. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2026, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/48 "2026-02-12T21:54:53Z")
> [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > But there’s a crucial difference that lingers all over this thread: everybody who says damn, hell, fuck, shit or something like that may be insulting, but they don’t discriminate against whole groups, while terms like “gay”, “retarded”, “jew down” or “gyp” certainly do. These terms are not really swear words, they are discriminating language. Not to be rude, but I figured that was sufficiently obvious that it didn’t need to be stated. What class of terms a society deems socially unacceptable is a function of what that society values. And while I’m 100% on board with society changing its class of “unacceptable terms” from “casual blasphemy” to “racial slurs” it’s fundamentally a subjective determination. We will, almost certainly, eventually move on to a different set of “unacceptable terms” at some point. ---
**Author:** ![Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/q.q.switcheroo/32/5713_2.png) [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2026, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/49 "2026-02-12T21:58:53Z")
> [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > they don’t discriminate against whole groups, while terms like “gay”, “retarded”, “jew down” or “gyp” certainly do Though you’ll still hear certain people swear up and down that “gay” (as in “that’s so gay!”) has nothing to do with homosexuality. (Yeah, sure. 🙄) ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2026, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/50 "2026-02-12T21:59:36Z")
Those people are idiots without any sense of nuance. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2026, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/51 "2026-02-12T22:00:41Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > And while I’m 100% on board with society changing its class of “unacceptable terms” from “racial slurs” to “casual blasphemy,” I bet you meant that the opposite of how it came out. ETA: My comment is now obsolete. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2026, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/52 "2026-02-12T22:02:35Z")
Sure did! Thanks, fixed it in my post. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2026, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/53 "2026-02-12T22:30:13Z")
> [@Pleonast](#): > > I feel that some people want short cuts when evaluating others. So instead of judging someone by the content of their character, they want to use their skin color, or their clothes, or their religion, or their speech Shortcuts to judgment have been part of society since the beginning of civilization. It’s just inevitable. What we need to establish as social mores is which of these shortcuts have merit and which are prejudicial, and in what contexts they should be applied. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2026, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/54 "2026-02-13T00:21:40Z")
Or, we could aspire to be and do better. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2026, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/55 "2026-02-13T02:15:14Z")
> [@Sitnam](#): > > What strikes me about American Civil War letters is their formality and elegant poetry. I’m afraid that elegant letters are cherrypicked from piles of ungrammatical and misspelled notes. Ken Burns’ formal and elegant programs are not real history. And the writers swore like sailors, I mean soldiers. > **[Kissing and Kicking Ass](https://www.civilwarmonitor.com/kissing-and-kicking-ass/)** > > Private Amos Breneman of the 203rd Pennsylvania Infantry was, by his own estimation, an ass. Addressing a male friend back in Lancaster County, he wrote in April 1865, “I am... > Civil War soldiers, for the most part, cared or thought little of politeness; they liberally used _ass_, _sh-t_, _damn_, _f–k_, and other profane words. These moral and prudish Victorians—as we tend to consider them—swore to a degree some may find disconcerting. Not all Union and Confederate soldiers were cussers, nor were they all literate, but many expressed their wartime emotions with strong language. > > Civil War officers and chaplains frequently lamented the use of crude language, and it bothered some men in the ranks as well. “Nancy,” a soldier from Ohio wrote in a letter home, “you have but a feint Idea of the wickedness and profanity of the Soldiers. I have been often kept from falling asleep Just by oaths and curses of the worst caracter and perhaps it would be the first thing that would greet my ears when I awoke.”[5] ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2026, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/56 "2026-02-13T03:57:43Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > This was absolutely ahistoric: in reality, a foul-mouthed saloon-owner would have used words like “Damn” and “Hell,” which were considered extremely strong swears during a time when people took blasphemy a lot more seriously. But if they wrote his character accurately, nobody would get that he’s being really explosively profane. As @Exapno_Mapcase’s quoted cite indicates, the notion that 19th-c. “Wild West” swearing was limited to words like “damn” and “hell” and “tarnation” etc., instead of featuring “fuck” and “shit” and similar, appears to be something of a recent urban legend. Sure, written and printed sources of the time didn’t include such horrifying terms, and it was considered inexcusably vile to pollute the ears of women and children with them, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t get said. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2026, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/57 "2026-02-13T04:04:31Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > As @Exapno_Mapcase’s quoted cite indicates, the notion that 19th-c. “Wild West” swearing was limited to words like “damn” and “hell” and “tarnation” etc., instead of featuring “fuck” and “shit” and similar, appears to be something of a recent urban legend. Okay, but “cocksucker?” ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2026, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/58 "2026-02-13T04:08:19Z")
Well, the OED says: > The earliest known use of the noun _cocksucker_ is in the 1880s. > OED’s earliest evidence for _cocksucker_ is from 1885, in a diary entry by F. S. Ryman. I sincerely doubt that Mr. Ryman invented the word out of his own head. It was doubtless shunned by many as unspeakably foul, but it was spoken (and even written) by enough people to keep it alive in the language. I mean, this is what always puzzles me when it’s claimed that serious obscenities like “fuck” weren’t significantly used “back then”: okay but in that case, how did they even survive linguistically? How did we get from the obscenity-laced Elizabethans to the raunchy 1920s (at least in male company) if there was any intervening period of a generation or more where even hard-cursing roughnecks just **weren’t using those words at all**? ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2026, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/59 "2026-02-13T17:48:17Z")
> The fact must come home to every observer that Deadwood’s rising generation is very depraved. Go where we will our ears are greeted with profanity and obscenity from almost baby lips, while our vision is assailed by sights of the most lamentable character. These urchins are not all of that peculiar class known as “hoodlums” for whom ignorance is some excuse, as many of them receive the kindest and best instruction at home, but from too lenient parents who allow their children to wander through the city, visiting haunts of iniquity where are exerted those pernicious influences which sooner or later deaden the most acute sensibility, destroy all sense of right and morality and inspire to an emulation of the worst characters of the town. _The Daily Deadwood Pioneer-Times_, Wed, Jan 26, 1881 ·Page 1 A newspaper search for “profanity” and “obscenity” around that time reveals numerous examples, condemning or merely reporting on people from lowlifes to politicians. It’s true that motherfucker and cocksucker do not appear to be widely used at the time, although that’s based only on written finds. Milch did a vast amount of [research](https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/columns/intelligencer/n_10191/). > [H]e spent a year researching the real town of Deadwood, South Dakota, including reading letters and diaries. He cites a bibliography he put together in his research. “It’s called ‘Profanity in Deadwood,’ and it has like 50 sources.” [Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower said](https://www.notesfromthefrontier.com/post/frontier-cussing): > “the evidence that we have is that they were using more religious blasphemy than the sexual insults which are popular today.” Milch decided to use modern profanity rather than contemporary uses because the intent of the language was to signal Deadwood’s culture and atmosphere to modern audiences in ways they would most react. Actual slang from the period would be risible today. Read the article I linked to quoting Sheidlower. It will blow your mind (a now-60 year old piece of slang). ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2026, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473/60 "2026-02-14T03:02:58Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Actual slang from the period would be risible today. Well, when Sheidlower is describing things like “cussing contests”, that’s in the nature of a performance art/spectator sport. Obviously you wouldn’t win a cussing contest by just snarling things like _“you shitty fucking cocksucker”_ over and over at your opponent. Creativity and style counted. But that doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t use the more blunt and crude obscenities at somebody you were really riled up at (as long as no women or children were within earshot). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-it-matter-to-society-if-language-is-cruder-or-fashion-less-formal/1027473.md?page=4)