# The origin of swear words and why people find them offensive. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 17, 2001, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886 "2001-02-17T16:41:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Badtz\_Maru](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e36b37/32.png) [@Badtz\_Maru](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Badtz_Maru)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2001, 8:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/21 "2001-02-19T08:13:31Z")
Just some tidbits of information… ‘Fuck’ is a mixed up word. We use it both as a word for having sex and in variations of ‘fuck you’ towards people we don’t like. This seems weird because we are wishing something pleasurable (usually) on someone we don’t like. I’ve read that it makes sense when you consider the origins of the word. ‘Fuck’ was an old Anglo-Saxon verb meaning ‘to strike’. Probably a case of onomotopeia (sp?), ‘fuck’ does kinda sound like the sound when you hit something. This original meaning makes it obvious why it was used in the ‘fuck you’ sense - you’re not wishing the person sex, you are wishing that they get hit. Later it got a separate meaning, ‘to have sex’. This is understandable, as today ‘I’d like to hit that’ is slang for ‘I’d like to have sex with her’. As to various swear words originally being acceptable, the only one I am sure that was OK was ‘cunt’, which had no negative connotations, several hundred years ago English mothers probably told their daughters to wipe their cunts after they piss. ---
**Author:** ![tygerbryght](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a9a28c/32.png) [@tygerbryght](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tygerbryght)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2001, 9:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/22 "2001-02-19T09:28:38Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Ben Yacobi \* > \*\*This is a question I’ve always wanted to know the answer to. What are the origins of swear words? Who invented them and did they mean something different at the time? The other thing I don’t know is why swear words offend people so much. How did certain words come to be so offensive? They are just words so why, for instance, do some people think that somehow kids are gonna be harmed just 'cos they hear a bunch of sounds vocalised in a particular way? \*\* I read the entire thread, just to be sure. No one else has commented on the variations of what, precisely, is a swear word in different countries/languages. Many of the words that are considered to be the most offensive in the U.S. have little effect in England, where saying “bloody (whatever)” is considered a far worse form of profanity by some. Why? Because they connect it back to the medieval practice of religious oaths, as “God’s blood,” “God’s bones,” etc. So you will hear Brits say “bloody hell,” (and that’s a particularly offensive one, connecting Jesus with hell) as is “bloody Keeriist (drawn out pronunciation of Christ).” Some also tend to combine the big Murkin four letter ones with “bloody” or “Christ”. I’d like to point out that quite different words (in terms of the meanings thereof) are used as profanity in other languages. Maybe some Dopers with other birth languages would enlighten us? ---
**Author:** ![Zyada](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zyada/32/3028_2.png) [@Zyada](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zyada)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2001, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/23 "2001-02-20T23:18:37Z")
Swear words generally fall under three categories: Religious Scatalogical Insults to Family members The last hasn’t been mentioned because it doesn’t occur very often in English, then only in context of other swear words. Hate words (the “N” word) seem to have come along very recently. You can’t say that someone “invented” swear words. They are learned behaviors. Children learn swearing two ways: First by example, where the child sees a parent swearing to express anger or pain or high emotion, the child learns that that is the way to handle those emotions. Secondly, by reinforcement. Children need attention(and like to provoke reactions), and at a certain age, they will repeat every word they hear over and over. When they repeat swear words adults around them will often give a lot of attention immediately, where any other word will be ignored. The reinforcement is refined as the child differentiates between the negative attention of swearing vs. more positive attention received in other ways. Negative attention can be desirable, especially if the child is angry or hurt, which is again reinforced by adult examples. Refinement also comes from the degree of reaction that the child gets from different words. Because swear words are reinforced by the reactions that they cause, the words change as our culture changes. The “N” word is a good example - it doesn’t feel like a swear word to me, but it was not a forbidden word when I was a young child (mid-60’s) and would not have gotten much reaction. It’s possible that people who are young children now will use it in the accusatory fashion (a la “You bastard”) and maybe the next generation will use it when they hit their thumb with a hammer. Interestingly enough, originally vulgar language was not necesarily swearing or bad language. It also included slang that was used by the lower orders. In the upper clases, use of vulgar language marked you as “Not our kind”. ---
**Author:** ![crazytrain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8e8cbc/32.png) [@crazytrain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crazytrain)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2012, 11:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/24 "2012-09-12T11:18:24Z")
I called someone SON OF A FUCK, and he got offended, and I asked why, we are all indeed the sons of a fuck, so why the fact is offensive?! ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2012, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/25 "2012-09-12T13:12:26Z")
> [@Bob\_Scene](#): > > Did words like “shit” and “fuck” and “cunt” start out as polite, everyday words hundreds of years ago and then somehow become impolite (kind of like the word “retarded” is doing) or were they cuss words from the start? I quote from my etymological dictionary, copyright 1938. Both listings “f **k" and "c** t” begin with the sentence “One of the two SE [standard English] words that cannot be printed anywhere in the English speaking world”. So they must have been standard English at one time. One thing that I realize is that right now we entirely lack any really strong expletive. Whereas once upon a time, magazines like the New Yorker didn’t allow even relatively mild expletives, nowadays “fuck” seems to appear several times in every issue. I guess people much younger than me cannot appreciate how strong that word was. You used it only in extremis and it conveyed the idea that you were in extremis. There is no such word that I am aware of today. In French (at least in Quebec) the swear words are mainly–or exclusively–religious. Two of the strongest are (in anglicized versions) “chalice” and “tabernacle”. I have no idea how they compare in strength to “fuck”. Will this usage survive the increasing loss of religion among French Canadians? Stay tuned. ---
**Author:** ![Oedipus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Oedipus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Oedipus)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2012, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/26 "2012-09-12T14:05:29Z")
It may have been mentioned, but I’ll go ahead and throw in my explaination. Some have obvious religious connection, so you can’t say godd\*\*\* or other things like that. However, as I’ve heard it, words that were just made up like s\*\*\* or f\*\*\* were once used by everyone. Then the upper echelons of society started using more proper names for these, but the poorer population still used “bad” words. So these words like s\*\*\* and f\*\*\* became “dirty” words that all the poor people used. It eventually became this thing that no reasonable person should use that type of language most commonly used by the plebes of society. ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2012, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/27 "2012-09-12T23:15:39Z")
> [@Zyada](#): > > Swear words generally fall under three categories: > > Religious > Scatalogical > Insults to Family members > > The last hasn’t been mentioned because it doesn’t occur very often in English, then only in context of other swear words. There’s _motherfucker_, which is indeed sort of a combination of the last two categories. And there is a common set of jokes (mainly in the black community) “Your mother’s so ugly, ..”. > [@Zyada](#): > > Because swear words are reinforced by the reactions that they cause, the words change as our culture changes. It also means that swear words in a foreign language are not meaningful. _Bloody_ is a major swear word in Britain, but nothing in America (and that’s even in the same language, just a different culture). As a child, we had French visitors staying at our farm, and I couldn’t figure out why they were saying “mud!” when it was dry & dusty out – it was many years before I realized they were saying “merde” (‘shit’). There is a story about early days of the Minnesota Twins, when they had a player from Central America, with very limited (almost none) English proficiency. Others on the team had a good time (mis-)teaching him some English words. So when he took his position on the field at the start of the game, he greeted the nearby umpire with “good afternoon, motherfucker”. (That umpire would have been upset, if he hadn’t noticed the other players laughing their heads off.) P.S. Are there any swear words used in the Bible? (As expletives, I mean, not actual swearing or cursing.) ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Colossus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.colossus/32/9423_2.png) [@Dr.Colossus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Colossus)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2012, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/28 "2012-09-12T23:45:04Z")
etymology of [FUCK](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck#Etymology) and [shit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shit#Etymology). ETA: why was this thread randomly resurrected from a decade ago? ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2012, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/29 "2012-09-13T00:35:04Z")
It happens. Stephen Pinker, in his book [The Stuff of Thought](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stuff_of_Thought), devotes a chapter to the psychology and neurology of swearing. It’s fascinating stuff. [A relevant interview](http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/the-stuff-of-thought-with-steven-pinker/3199954): > [@](#): > > it’s a strange psychological and even biological phenomenon that, for example, when some misfortune befalls us, if we slice our thumb together with the bagel or knock a glass of wine into our laps, the topic of our conversation abruptly switches to theology or excretion or sexuality. And of course there’s the phenomenon of people who can’t seem to get a sentence out without three or four uses of the F word or the word ‘bloody’ which used to be highly inflammatory but… > … > Swearing taps into different parts of the brain than ordinary articulate speech. This has been known for quite some time because often neurological patients who suffer a stroke to the parts of the brain that underlie language and become aphasic, unable to speak fluently, have no trouble with swearing. They can swear like a sailor even though they can’t put an articulate sentence together. Neuro imaging studies have shown that taboo words light up primitive parts of the brain like the amygdala which responds to threatening stimuli, like an angry face or a dangerous animal. > > Also the right hemisphere which we know plays less of a role in articulate language…typically, strokes to the right hemisphere don’t make a person aphasic, but the right hemisphere seems to be more involved in swearing than the left hemisphere. It suggests that basically taboo words activate brain areas that are associated with negative emotion, disgust, with hatred, with revulsion at sexual depravity, with awe and fear of deities, and all of the topics that get turned into swear words in different languages all have something to do with strongly felt emotion. and so on. ---
**Author:** ![WhyWhyWhy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whywhywhy/32/7539_2.png) [@WhyWhyWhy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyWhyWhy)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2012, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/30 "2012-09-13T03:15:51Z")
> [@Dani\_Filth](#): > > Profanity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers… > > _ducking and running_🙂 > > -Dani LMMFAO! And publicly! Feels kinda nice to be so fuckin improper ever once in a while. No, I don’t understand why some people find them so offensive but I do see the appeal of using them. Fuck, yeah! ---
**Author:** ![janeslogin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/df788c/32.png) [@janeslogin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/janeslogin)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2012, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/31 "2012-09-13T22:25:31Z")
[Amazon.com: Stephen Dodson: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle](http://www.amazon.com/Stephen-Dodson/e/B002PIA294) wrote a book about this. ---
**Author:** ![Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiendish_astronaut/32/3295_2.png) [@Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fiendish_Astronaut)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/32 "2012-09-14T00:41:56Z")
Thanks for the extra answers! ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2012, 6:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/33 "2012-09-15T06:25:17Z")
> [@janeslogin](#): > > [Amazon.com: Stephen Dodson: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle](http://www.amazon.com/Stephen-Dodson/e/B002PIA294) wrote a book about this. Is Amazon doing the clipboard-hijacking spam thing, too, now? Or did you just paste the wrong thing in? ---
**Author:** ![listedmia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e0b2c6/32.png) [@listedmia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/listedmia)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2012, 8:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/34 "2012-09-15T08:56:10Z")
Zombiefucker Asszombie Son of a zombie Your mother’s a zombie Eat zombie and die Suck my zombie Zombie Christ on a crutch Etc. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2012, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886/35 "2012-09-15T14:11:30Z")
For the same reason that a “tree” is a big green leafy plant and a “dog” is a four legged furry animal. That’s what those words mean. If you call me a “nice guy” then I know that those words mean something positive that you are conveying to me. If you call me a “sawed off little prick” then I know that your opinion of me is less than stellar. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-origin-of-swear-words-and-why-people-find-them-offensive/54886.md?page=1)