Profanity Enters Public Discourse (or, What Happens When Nothing’s Dirty Anymore?)

Contents

On the cover
Americans still lead the world in hell of shit, but no longer in the arena of technology. Decades of slacking have left the US' working population left out of the biggest advances and even the military looks to be falling behind: Leader, page 15. Busted-ass telecoms, page 35. Motherfuckers be tripping, pages 39-41

8 The world this week

Leaders

13 Euro Pussies
What in the damn hell

14 Fucking Chinks
Shitty leadership surprise

15 US Techno Meltdown
Told you, bitch

17 The New Assholes
Labour fucked you again

Letters

20 On smuggling, the Arab League, fucked-up tariffs, shit

Special Report

31 Education in Africa
Still shitcanned after all these years

...etc.

some of us are of the opinion that the wall street journal's editorial page is profane and disgusting enough even w/t any cussing.

Art critic Robert Hughes.

Meanwhile, to think that we're living in an 'anything goes' sort of world, or heading for one, is a complete fairy tale. Look at this story for proof that we're slipping ever further back into fustian prudery.

I'm just talking about a whole bunch of words that used to live in the home and the bar, and are now living more and more in public.

(Oh, and I think Robert Hughes is wrong. You sure as fuck can say "girl.")

x-post yeah, I think that words which refer in a derogatory manner to people are replacing acts which refer to bodily functions as the most powerful swearwords.

xpost regardless, as long as my mom is alive, i will not be able to comfortably refer to someone or something as a cunt. and that's a satisfying thought.

I think it's indicative of the typically northern European scatological humour and profanity, whereas southern Europeans (more specifically Mediterranean) use sexual words instead. Err, not sure what this means.

This British (pagan. wtf) exchange student in college used twat liberally. We never told her its American connotation cause it was more fun to just giggle at it.
-- oops

Um, what is the American connotation? I assume it's the same as ours, dear! I.e. referring to a lady's front bottom. Now you people
saying 'fanny' really is funny. Do Americans say 'bugger'? Because if you think about it it's a pretty rude word, but it's such a mild swearword in Britain it's untrue.

I'd have thought that in UK/Irish usage cunt has undergone a reverse, EG I would apply it to men with some frequency, but would probably hesitate about applying it to women, due to being infected with American memes.

There was a great ad about five years ago for the Ford Explorator or somesuch, set in Australia, which featured various manly men overdoing jobs because they hadn't reckoned with the power of the Explorator (pushing over an entire to-the-horizon fence instead of nudging a post upright, pulling only the top half of a calf out of the mud, that sort of thing). After each mishap the gent would lean out of the window, survey the damage and say "Buggah" in various tones of annoyance, resignation or suprised awe.

Most applicable thread I could come up with...Another teacher and I had some grade 6s decorating the gym on Friday afternoon for an upcoming concert. One of the guys helping--well, he's a motormouth who never shuts up, and I asked him to help rather than send him to gym class, where there was a substitute teacher in for the day. Anyway, the other teacher overheard the following exchange after we had cleaned up and the kids were headed out to their busses:

Motormouth guy: "That was fuckin' crazy!"*
His female friend: "You said you were off the cussing."

*[Yes, completely crazy--they were putting pieces of masking tape on student art.]

I may as well throw in. I drive a variety of 13 to 15 year olds on my school bus. It would be insanity to pretend these kids don't know large swaths of profanity, and have most likely dabbled their toes in internet porn of some degree.

My main approach when I hear kids talking shit is to calmly pick up my intercom mic and announce, "I would like to remind all students to please keep their language and their subject matter appropriate to the bus." I am willing to do this as often as necessary, always in the same calm tone of voice.

In the event one student seems not to get the picture, I make them wait before getting off the bus at school and have a brief chat with them. I explain that I'm not going to make a federal case out of a few "bad" words, but it's a matter of courtesy, that when there are dozens of people in a small space that you not do rude stuff. Off the bus, go crazy, I tell them. On the bus, I expect better. And if you can't stop, do it quietly enough I can't hear you.

This seems to work, amazingly.

I've employed "you're an utter cunt" to people when I'm real mad at them before. Or said "that was a cunty thing to do". As swears go it still has a bit of power but tbh Australians swear so much that nothing seems to, anymore.

But, I am a guttermouth.

Cunt is about the only swear word with power anymore, yeh. Its even fun to NOT say in the way that bloody or bollocks or God Damn were in the past eg "what a country!"

I don't really know what this thread is, but it seems close enough. I woke up with a start at 2:30 this morning (might have been a nightmare), but as my mind wandered for an hour, trying to get back to sleep, I started to think about profanity. My daughter had asked me couple of days ago what makes a bad word a bad word, and I could give her a sort of general answer but it must have gotten me thinking. Let's take the word "shit" at its most basic level as meaning "feces." At some point, for some reason, someone devised "shit" as a slang substitute for "feces." Then that slang substitute someone spread from one person to many people until it was prominent enough to spark a backlash as "profane" or crude or whatever. But ... why? How? It's just a word that means another word, and could not have been *instantly* profane. It had to have begun as just a word that means another word and then, somehow, sometime, someone suddenly determined it was ... unacceptable? Based on what? Was it totally arbitrary? How far did the word "shit" have to spread before it was deemed problematic? How long does it take between the invention of a slang word and its would-be suppression? Is there a good book or something on any of this?

why would “shit” have to be a slang substitute tho? more likely “shit” was simply the word for shit. why use a fancy loan word for it?

I guess reviving old threads like this is instructive, since I didn't even lurk here in 2004 and allusions to the "bad old days" or specific posters are sometimes a little opaque, but ugh the first few posts itt are awful.

Like many value judgements around usage, it's most likely a class thing - the Anglo Saxons were saying "shit" while it was all "feces" in the dining room.

I can totally imagine it was a class thing. But does that mean that the lower class came up with the word "shit" because "feces" was too fancy? Or vice versa? And even if one was created as an alternative or even companion to the other, why was "shit" deemed profanity or not merely coarse? Like, there are a lot of words for "feces" (for example) that are not considered profanity.

they just threw shit at the wall and it stuck

Going back to what I said before, "shit" (or any "profane" word) had to circulate wildly for it to be prominent enough to be labeled "profane," wouldn't it? There must be an indiscernible profanity tipping point, when a word goes from slang used between a couple of people to global menace.

Today I learned a new phrase: "minced oath" (which sounds like a breakfast offering)

A minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo term to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics. Some examples include "gosh" (God), "darn", or "dang" (damn), "doggone", or "gosh darn" (goddamn), "shucks", "shoot", "shinola" “shitaki” (shit), "heck" (hell), "gee", "jeez", "jeepers", or "Jiminy Cricket" (Jesus Christ), "feck", "fudge", "frick", "fork", "flip", or "eff" (fuck)

This is fascinating and seems like it would open the door to me wasting even more time than usual:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath

Come on, Josh, brush up on your history, 'shit' is not slang.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjMOt1h-dH0

Maybe you don't have it in the USA, but, to this day, the expression 'Anglo-Saxon language' means to swear or using crude or uncultured language.

I thought it was just bad words people learned from listening to Anglo metal band Saxon.

it was all "feces" in the dining room.

man, and we thought elementary school cafeteria food was bad

only fancy diners got the feces. everyone else got shit.

Moral opprobrium for Carlin's seven words doesn't seem to have been an issue (in English, at any rate) until the 18th century. "scitte"/"Shite" was originally a neutral term. "Gropecunt Lane" was a relatively common street name in larger towns.

Right up til Georgian times, legally recognized profanity was truly "profane" in it's original sense. "By God’s wounds", "the Devil fetch me", "God's bones", etc.

Yeah, that's all touched on in the "minced oath" wiki. So what changed?

Carlin's words hardly appear in 18th century private letters, so there were definitely recognizable class differences by then. And then there's the perverse Victorian moral sensibilities (starve millions of Indians: fine - say "cunt" in polite company: no social parties for you). I imagine the inflection point for use among the masses probably happened earlier though, in the early 19th century. Maybe wider spread church sponsored education?

And yet every language and culture has profanity equivalents.

This always bugged me as a teacher--the line on what I had to pretend not to hear out on yard duty was forever moving over the course of 20 years. To state the obvious--in the culture at large--things have got noticeably worse since 2016.

i blame dennis franz

Obviously, the words are not 'bad', in that they are just a series of phonemes. What they represent, mostly sexuality and strong emotions, are also not 'bad' in the sense that they are normal and necessary parts of human existence. But sexuality and strong emotions are potent sources of social friction and societies feel a need to try to regulate them, through repression or redirection.

On a practical level, none of this can be socially regulated any more, because the current social friction runs too deep and too strongly for that. Conservatives don't seem to get this; instead of healing the social rifts, they just want to increase the punishment for expressing it until all visible evidences of the deeper problems are driven back out of sight.

JIC used "shit" as the example he was thinking about. It doesn't require much thought to notice that "shit" is used as a marker of strong emotions far more often than as a label for a substance evacuated from the lower gut. It isn't just another word for feces; it is a potent metaphor for something repellent or a spontaneous exclamation of pain, disappointment or surprise. That's why "chair" is not a profanity. It has a wholly different emotional weight.

brb gotta go take a spontaneous exclamation of pain

shall I assist you by stomping on your foot?

But shit started out as meaning feces (right?) and has since evolved to mean and be used for all sorts of other ... shit. But that, the evolution of usage, seems to be something else entirely. For example, I just used "shit" to mean "stuff," which is a pretty neutral, innocuous use, yet "shit" is still marked as a profanity, even in that innocuous context. But just sticking with the original idea of profane terms that sub in for sexuality and strong emotions and the like, a word isn't instantly born "bad," it has to be branded as such, and that would only come after it had gained enough popularity to make the powers that be wary, which I assume would have taken ... several years? And yet every country, culture and language has them, which implies these respective slang substitutes evolved independently around the world. Are there some places where there is no concept of profanity? Or maybe outside of what's considered blasphemy, at least?

"shit" is still marked as a profanity, even in that innocuous context.

As f. hazel would no doubt tell us, words evolve constantly and some words have acquired dozens of layers of new uses and meanings over time, Using "shit" to neutrally mean "stuff" or "things" is one of its most recent accretions. To tell the truth, when I hear it used that way I don't think of it as a profanity; I think of it as a substitute for "stuff" and it is completely emptied of its taboo power in that context.

And yet if you tell someone to move their shit, that's like an angry version of "stuff."