Well, lessee…I could move to the U.K. and enjoy free and easy use of the word “cunt”.
Or I could stay in the U.S. and eat good barbecue.
Not a tough choice.
We have good barbeque in Australia, so if you move here you get the best of both worlds. 
Also, I was more interested in the general concept of swearing between the US and the other Western Anglophone countries, without getting too caught up in the “This word is harmless in the UK but is a mortal insult in the US!” side of things, but it’d be interesting to explore why that’s the case.
The influence of conservative Christian groups in the US does seem to be a definite factor in the more… conservative US approach to casual swearing, though.
Now I have to figure out how to ask my Aussie coworker how offensive she finds “cunt” without dying of embarassment myself. It’s not like she doesn’t have a mouth on her (in a most entertaining way) but I haven’t heard that word. But she’s been here a few years so I’m sure she figured out quickly that it is the Nuclear Swear Word in American English.
Then there’s my boss, who starts swearing in German or Afrikaans (she’s Austrian/South African) when she gets really mad about something…I must get her to teach me some vocabulary. Both languages sound very good for swearing.
As for us Americans I guess we’re a bunch of prigs or something.
Because though we all (Anglophones that is) speak ‘English’, we use the language in different ways, and different words mean different things to us. Hell, in the US, there are quite a few regional dialects, where words or phrases don’t mean the same things in one region as they do in others. IOW, we all have different ‘slang’, and what may be offensive by one group is not considers so by someone from another…and vice versa.
‘Cunt’ is a perfect example. I realize that a lot of non-American’s pride themselves on the fact that they can sling this around without raising eyebrows, but in the context of how I was raised, this was the equivalent of saying ‘nigger’…i.e. it was a derogatory and highly insulting term used to belittle females. It’s not the fact that it’s a ‘swear-word’ that makes it vile, it’s the associated baggage that goes along with the term as it was used and associated in my own formative years. ‘Fuck’ on the other hand (or, in my case ‘puta’) pretty much were in general use, so I’m less than horrified by it’s use…in fact, I tend to use that as a general purpose expletive in most cases.
It all depends on HOW the language is being used, and the context of the slang. I’ll give you a parting for instance which will probably not mean much to anyone here who didn’t grow up in my own area (and who isn’t Hispanic). One insult that would nearly always get you into a fight would be to refer to someone as having big balls. In fact, the equivalent of flipping someone off in my neighborhood would be to make a gesture implying the person you are insulting has big balls (usually a raised eyebrow and a tug at one’s pants indicating the need for more room). Why? Because big balls implied (in my youth where I grew up) that one was stupid (like an ox or bull steer). Big balls = moron = insult. But…go somewhere 5 miles away from my neighborhood and big balls = someone with guts, courage, or just a lot of moxie. And, in fact today, in my neighborhood the big balls thing now pretty much means what it means to most others…courage, daring, moxie. The meaning has changed over time, and the use and context of the term has shifted.
Anyway, that’s my two cents…
-XT
I’m not convinced that the US is more conservative about casual swearing than the rest of the English speaking world. If conservative Christian groups cause hang-ups about swearing, explain the Irish, the Catholic Church is pretty damn conservative.
You can say cunt with wild abandon, we can say fanny without raising an eyebrow, can name our kids Fanny and Randy and talk about shag rugs all day. Words evolve differently in different cultures. A team can even win a toss off while keeping their pants on in the US, while saying the football team repeatedly beat off the opposition when they attempted goals makes for some interesting imagery to Americans.
Surely there is a world of difference between how the word is used [oh and is that right ‘you can say the word cunt with wild abandon?’] --I wonder what purpose the insertion of a string of swearwords achieves—maybe to the young it gives a feeling of ‘empowerment’ --surely we are not saying at our advanced seniority we still have a need for that empowerment?
Perhaps it’s because conservative Christianity in the USA differs in many respects from conservative Christianity in Ireland in other nations?
For example, despite a much higher percentage of Irish students attending high schools run by church authorities than their US contemporaries, public acceptance of evolution theory is about 20 percentage points higher in Ireland than in the US.
There is no Irish equivalent to the Parents Television Council, headed by Catholic Brent Bozell, which uses its political clout to threaten and intimidate broadcasters and law-makers over trivial profanities. As I previously stated, there are considerably greater public indecencies broadcast into thousands of Irish households every evening with nary a peep of protest.
The V-Chip is not an Irish invention - it is a 100% American “solution” to the issue of vulgarities on the public airwaves that, to date, has only caught on (somewhat) in Canada, and nowhere else in the Western world.
It is not a question of only certain words being accepted in the US and not overseas, and vice versa, but rather a pervasive element of prudish restrictiveness more evident in the US than in other Western nations.
Of course here in America we have no problem with violence on TV. Lop a few heads off, blow away someone with a shotgun, no big deal.
Violence built this country, made it strong, and kept it strong. Sex merely populated it.
This could run and run. As the Readers Digest says, it pays to expand your vocabulary, and my library shelf of swearing dictionarys gives one the range to make a merchant seaman blush. The two major online (British English) resources are Roger’s Profanisaurus, from the wonderful Viz comic, and the Urban Dictionary. Both are continuously updated.
There are regional variations in levels of offence taken at certain words, even in a small country like the UK. “Knacker” (meaning either testicle (noun) or break (verb), or else “knacker’s yard” for slaughterhouse) is a fairly inoffensive word in the South, but much stronger in the North. There was a famously short-lived advertising campaign for Jacobs Cream Crackers that had the tagline “Don’t knacker it, cracker it” that was produced by an ad agency in the South, and killed by floods of complaints from outraged people in the North. Likewise “twat” (meaning either vagina or a foolish and moderatly unpleasant person) is, in the South, halfway between the mild “fanny” and full-strength “cunt”, but when (Southern) Conservative party leader David Cameron used it in an interview a few months back it generated floods of complaints, mostly from the North where it’s higher up the offensiveness scale. He should have used the milder derivative “twit”, or at least pronounced it correctly (from a Northern perspective) as “twot”.
I don’t mean to imply that people in the North of Britain are more prudish, more easily offended, or tend to swear less, as that certainly isn’t the case, it’s just they seem to have a slightly greater range of full-strength words to choose from.
I hear “twat” is pretty strong in the US too, and certainly “cunt” is used differently, IIRC as a term of abuse for an objectionable woman or effeminate male (do correct me if I’m wrong, I’m extrapolating from that one Curb Your Enthusiam episode). In the UK it’s almost exclusively used as a term for an objectionable male, and it’s rarely used as a romantic term for a ladygarden.
There was an episode of The Simpsons where Bart was doing his British thing, and he uttered a word that I was genuinely surprised by. Can’t for the life of me recall it right now, but I do recall thinking “he can’t say that!”. It wasn’t cockney rhyming slang I don’t think, though that does create a wonderful dissonance in those who are familiar with the derivations - for instance “berk” (pr. “burk”) and “charlie” are considered very mild terms for a foolish person, though when the full derivations are revealed as “Berkshire Hunt” and “Charlie Blunt” they are revealed in a new light. And to a lesser extent “taking the Mickey [Bliss]”.
Words change in strength over the ages too. Not so long ago “cock” was pretty strong, unless referring to a male chicken and even then the inuendo was ever-present, but now it’s been diluted somewhat where it’s TV-friendly when referring to an objectionable fellow. The presenters on motoring programme Top Gear have much to do with this, through repeated use, e.g. “The Aston Martin DB9 is now a cock’s car”. It’s now on par with “dick”.
Talking of which, world-champion F1 racing driver Lewis Hamilton (not a dick) got busted by the cops for burning rubber in the street during the weekend of the Australian Grand Prix weekend this year. Right in the middle of Queensland’s “Don’t be a Dickhead” road safety campaign. The UK isn’t quite ready for such forthrightness yet, though it was widely reported in the media without censorship.
UK broadcasting does have strict rules about swearing, and there is indeed a 9pm watershed for the stronger words, but there are exceptions. A long-standing announcer of the popular Shipping Forecast, late night on BBC Radio 4, was fired recently for letting slip the f-word on air when his mic was accidentally left open. And yet I heard the same word used on the same channel mid-morning recently in a quote from Truman Capote, though in the latter case the programme was preceded by a warning of strong language to follow.
Pray tell! Given that this thread is littered with the c-word, I’m dying to know what it is. Until someone enightens me, I’m just going to have to run through my Anglo-Saxon vocabulary in random sequence… Felchspoon… batty cleft … arsecandle … the bit between your bumhole and your girl place … queef … winnets … cumulonimbus … teabag …
In proper upstanding American idiom it’s called the ‘taint’. T’aint the pussy, but t’aint the asshole.
The answer is: Christians
I really don’t like the terms “F-bomb” or “potty-mouth”. There are others, can’t think of them right now. Do other English speaking countries use these or like terms?
I didn’t even know you were Ill! 
Glad you’re better though.
No. “F-bomb” and “C-bomb” are Americanisms.
What?
As a Brit, a lot of stuff in this thread has genuinely confused me. Are there people (probably in America) that think that “bloody” and “fanny” are swear words in the UK? They’re about as innocuous as it gets. Hell, “fanny” is probably only ever used these days by children as a “safe” word for the vagina in the same way that “willy” is for the penis.
Someone mentioned that you can get away with more on cable in the US. I really don’t understand that. I’m a big fan of The Daily Show, a cable show, and it genuinely amuses me some of the stuff they end of bleeping, like “ass” and “dick” (IIRC). Am I right in saying that in the US you can get away with saying more on premium cable channels with the others subject to the same restrictions as the traditional terrestrial free to air networks?
Yes, the premium channels are much less restricted. Some shows are uncut altogether.
I had been told that bloody was uncool in England because it referred to the blood of the Holy Virgin.
Is nothing sacred across the pond? Would you curse the Queen or God and country? World Cup?
I don’t know how advanced you are, but I have creaking old bones and I’m getting shorter. I need all the empowerment I can get. A few well-chosen words and a shake of my cane work wonders on little children.
When my grandson was fourteen, we sat on the frontsteps and had a most interesting discussion on the advantages of a well-played “fuck” and the disadvantages of a poorly timed use. It really fucked his mind up.
I’ve no trouble with most swear words, myself; it’s the intent that matters.