It starts with using God’s name in vain. Doing so is profane by defination. Another facet is that French speaking English snobs declared Anglo-Saxon body parts and functions as profane. If so, why "Pardon my French.’’?
As for bitch, female dogs’ behavior, when in season, is such that it is a horrible term to apply to a woman. Also intractable problems with dogs not getting along mopst often involve 2 females. Not that there aren’t many pairs of females that get along fine. I love dog questions on general Q&A sites that censor bitch. I once had jerk censored when I was discussing leash use. Then there is Mr. Cheney on some sites.
And this is where the word “swearing” comes in as well. A preacher I know once said that “don’t take God’s name in vain” didn’t really have much to do with saying “God damn” or whatever the Hebrew equivalent was in Moses’ time. It was referring more to invoking the name of God when swearing an oath*: “I swear on the name of the Lord that I will/will not do this thing!”, particularly if you had no intention of keeping your word. It’s why Jesus later said, “Don’t swear. Let your yes be yes and your no be no.” Or put another way, “If you will do something, say you will and then do it. If you won’t do something, say you won’t, and then don’t. Don’t swear oaths.”
And note that “oath” is also used to describe someone cussing: “He muttered an oath under his breath.”
In Treasure Island, the parrot’s cry of “pieces of eight” was taken as profane. I’ve never understood why, unless “pieces of eight” is a polite substitution, and the parrot was really saying “motherfucker” or somesuch thing.
Huh. When I was a teenager I started saying “bloody” as I thought it was a safe swear word (growing up in the US), but somebody then told me that “bloody” was short for “blood of Christ,” which made me stop.
My understanding of this, is that certain bodily functions are considered moderately taboo.
Blaspheming the locally worshiped deity and insults to others are also ‘swear words’.
This is all in context, of course.
A lot of the badness in euphemisms goes back to the religious notion that got exemplified by Jimmy Carter’s lusting in his heart. Intentions are as bad as deeds. If you use tinker’s dam as a way of avoiding god damn but you meant it that way and everybody knows you meant it that way, what you’ve done is as bad as actually saying god damn. Pure in thought as in deed is the requirement.
Nobody lives up to this, and euphemisms eventually get accepted because those who try to enforce their avoidance often get a bigger reputation as scolds than the swearers do a sinners.
Trying to parse the logic of people who have a religious ideal in their heads is a losing game. But that’s how American society wound up in a place where depictions of violence are rewarded and depictions of bare skin are condemned. It’s the same process underneath.
I teach kids from a lot of different socioeconomic backgrounds. It’s funny how some kids walk around saying “sh**” all day without their parents caring, and some get hit or yelled at just for saying “shut up”.
As a kid, I was always uneasy saying “darn” since it was so close to “damn” and the small difference was enough to get me hit with a wooden spoon.
I find the content on primetime sitcoms to be much more offensive than “shut up” or “damn”, but culture has no problem with kids quoting lines from Modern Family and Work It.
Sure, anyone can say that their newly coined word is dirty. But can you convince the rest of the culture that your filthy neologism deserves to be bleeped on TV or radio? That’s the kind of “real swear word” metric I’m curious about. I can’t think of any swear that people have deemed censorworthy, that wasn’t at some point in history a non-swear word.
For anyone interested in an in-depth discussion on the subject (though a little light on etymologies for my taste), I suggest Forbidden Words, Taboo, and the Censoring of Language by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge.
I’ve long been interested in the subject, and it’s just too complex a phenomenon to address in a forum context, but I think there are two important things to keep in mind.
1: It seems there is a biological/neurological/cultural compulsion among humans to create and then avoid taboos (as evidenced by euphemisms). Sex, waste, death, and disease are frequently taboo subjects, resulting in a plethora of ever-changing euphemism. Even seemingly clinical terms like “penis” and “vagina” were originally euphemistic words that meant “tail” and “sheath”. Apparently the word occupy became a euphemism for copulation in the 17th and 18th century, fell out of favor for nonsexual uses, then reemerged without the baggage later. As for swearing itself, there is evidence that suggests that there are neurological pathways exclusive to swearing. Something very real seems to be going on here beyond the peculiarities of a culture.
2: All language is arbitrary. Words can acquire and discard meanings and connotations quite easily. This is self-evident, but makes the concept of taboo words (curses, swears, oaths, etc.) inherently absurd. My own father refuses to “swear” in the conventional sense, but when a hammer hits his thumb, he’ll let loose a cry of “Dad Blasted…!” It’s his version of swearing (and a pretty obvious euphemism of “God Damned”), and functions essentially the same for him. Not that he would ever admit it.
So, how do you reconcile these two points? You can’t really, if you take it seriously. Even a seemingly innocuous Hannah Barbara catchphrase like “Gadzooks!” has it’s origins in “God’s Hooks” referring to the nails pinning Jesus Christ to the cross, but everyone who remembers that is dead now, so it’s become G-Rated.
As a kid, I rented a Sega Genesis game “Toejam and Earl” and played it with one of my cousins. She quickly got uncomfortable because the game frequently used the word “funk”. She’d never heard it before and obviously thought it was a different four-letter word beginning with “f”.
I always get depressed by how religious convention can make people afraid of something that’s so completely innocent. So often religions teach (implicitly or explicitly) to fear the unknown and the new, as opposed to a healthy curiosity. I suppose it’s not just religion, but it so often is.
From a literary perspective, there tends be a tendency (depending on culture, of course) to have an ebb and flow toward and away from “obscenity.” A good example is Jonathan Swift’s poem, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” which includes the line “Oh, Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” And this from the Dean of St. Pat’s Cathedral in Dublin.
Over time, folks in the English/Irish/American world became more squeamish about such things (among them the “peeping” at “hoary” items in a woman’s bedroom).
And now we’re in an era where almost anything goes (despite occasional protest by the FCC and such). I’m reminded of the 1991 release of Anthrax’s song “Startin’ Up a Posse,” which was directed personally at Tipper Gore’s push to censor music, and the line “shit, fuck, Satan, death, sex, drugs, rape / These 7 words you’re trying to take.”
That was, obviously, also reference to Carlin’s “7 words” bit. But I would argue that there’s clear evidence that different eras certainly appear to have varying levels of tolerance for, and definition of, profanity.
Interesting, I’ve often thought about this very thing…where did profanity come from and who decided which words were profane? I do think that INTENTION makes the difference. For instance, when we’re speaking of a beaver building his “dam”, this is acceptable. But of course, the opposite, “damn” is profane. The same could be assigned to the words “hell” and “ass” and “bitch”. If referring to the devil’s “hang out”, or to a donkey or to a female dog, these are acceptable. But if using them to express anger or disgust toward a person, this is where the line is drawn. I imagine it has to do with the denegration of the person??? Also, “GD” IS profane for a very good reason…it does indeed take the name of the Lord in vain; specifically, it uses His name to express disgust, the same way someone might use any other cuss word. When we speak of Him, it is to be in reverence. And contrary to the belief of some, the “God” in “GD” DOES infact contain the name of the Almighty. And from the bible we see that even God does not approve of the profane used, especially with His name. “Let the WORDS of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to You, oh, Lord” (Psalm 19:14). And the bible tells us that “Peter cursed” when he became upset after denying Christ (Matthew 26:74). God wants not only our words but our thoughts as well. So, Idon’t think cuss words are simply something that man alone recognizes as unacceptable…I think even God recognizes there are right words and wrong words, acceptable and unacceptable. So, they may have been man-created, but it’s more than merely “socially unacceptable”; even God Himself does not approve, so words are not merely words…they DO have significance.
Are there any forbidden words today? My etymological dictionary has the entries:
c**t
f**k
and for each has the statement that this is one of the two S[tandard] E[nglish] that cannot appear in print anywhere in the English speaking world. Both that they are standard English and their utterly taboo status in the 30s was interesting and I will affirm that they had retained that in the 40s and 50s. Still, in the mid 50s, a grad student in the lab I was working at came in one morning and said, “It is MF cold out there.” Now both words, but especially “fuck” appears regularly in print, e.g. in the New Yorker. So I ask, are there any words around today that had the impact that “fuck” had then. (“Cunt” was not used as a swear word, but as a super negative expletive directed as a woman.)
Many of these words were just the common names for bodily function - shit, piss etc and a hundred years or more ago, were used in everyday speech and not considered shocking.
Shakespeare deliberately uses the “C” word, famously in the line from Hamlet:
Hamlet: "Or did you think I meant country matters? "
Ophelia: "I think nothing, my lord. "
Hamlet: “That’s a fair thought, to lie between maid’s legs.”
This would surely have been well understood by his audience and the actor would have emphasised the first five letters of ‘country’.
I find ‘bitch’ a curious word. It is considered far more offensive in the US than over here. Rude, certainly, to call a female a bitch, but not devastating.
Another curiosity - A friend of mine, female, called an American man in an internet chat room “soppy”. Over here it just means a bit silly or sentimental; a bit girly maybe. It can be affectionate even. The American guy took great exception to it but we don’t know why.
