Profanity

i swear liberally. the words help one's flow.
and i like that they offend people. without that, they'd have no weight.

i am not always successful in keeping those words out of "polite" conversations. so i wondered about that: english has no way to distinguish formal from informal speech, no pronoun to shift for example. so maybe swearing is just a way to separate one register of social interaction from another.

in my role as the bad uncle, i have in the past taken some glee in the idea of undermining the regimens put into place by others.
however, it seems that a shared characteristic within this particular gene pool is that we are all, regardless of age, vulgar and horrible people.
so it was never a matter of undermining something: it was more turning on a spigot that allowed this type of socio-linguistic experimentation to flow into my car. for example.

 

I think that's why I dropped swearing in junior high--I wanted to sound more like the characters in the books I was reading, and less like the people around me.

Of course, now, some of the smartest people I know use "fuck" on a regular basis...but, like mixedmedia was saying, they use it with panache.

 

English definitely has other ways of distinguishing formal vs informal, although maybe none as completely transparent as tu/vous or similar (the T-V distinction is also related to politeness/familiarity, so it possibly goes beyond just being formal/informal). I think shifting between formal and informal is something we all seem to know how to do quite automatically so perhaps it's not even really obvious when we do it (I know I don't spend time considering how to express myself in different situations, I just seem to get on with it, and I am pretty neurotic).

I feel it's possible to speak informally without swearing at all (not that you were suggesting otherwise as far as I can see). Using slang is one thing that comes to mind, and even just using less formal variants of the same concepts (e.g. "I was laid off" instead of "I was made redundant"). There are also grammar things that'll show it (e.g. "don't" instead of "do not") and certain vocabulary, even if not slangy or offensive, will show it up too (e.g. "He offered to purchase a beverage" vs "He offered to buy a drink"). Anyway, I'll stop banging on, I'm sure you get the idea.

But I agree, swearing is definitely one of the things you can employ to make your speech informal, probably the most obvious standout thing. Now that I've said that, I'm trying to imagine a situation where the speech is otherwise very formal and the profanity kind of forces it into informal register. "May I suggest that you make yourself scarce, cocksucker."

 

Two of my favourite personal stories (I only have 5) involve swearing. While backpacking through Europe oh-so-many years ago, we were travelling back from Torremolinos in southern Spain to Paris. We ended in an eclectic group consisting of Paul (a 22 year-old computer programmer from London), Rafi (a 21 year-old sergeant in the Spanish Army), Midori (a 23 year-old Japanese travel agent planning to spend the summer in France to learn French), Dirk (the Jerk from Vancouver; no one liked him, but he attached himself to us like a leech), Damien (a gay punk rock musician from London), and Hannah (a 16 year-old Norwegian girl spending the summer in France to learn French after 2 weeks in Spain). The tale of our brief trip together goes well beyond the scope of this thread, but after the bar car closed, we ended up sitting BETWEEN cars as we had different compartments and didn't want to disturb the others sleeping there. Hannah spoke excellent English; Midori almost none, but we got into a wonderful discussion of how to swear properly in English. Hannah was working on the finer points having little difficulty with the word fuck (of slavic origin most likely anyway). Midori, on the other hand, could say DAMN very well, but fuck just seemed to elude her. I still remember all of laughing drunkenly at her mispronunciations. I'm not sure she ever really knew what we were teaching her, but she certainly was cute

I also have a Polish brother-in-law (from Warsaw). He was in London when the Solidarity crackdown occurred, called his uncle in Canada, and never looked back. He started out working in construction, and says he was desperate to fit in with his co-workers, especially learning the proper use of the most useful and versatile word in English: fuck. He was amazed at the many different ways it could be used (verb, noun, adjective, adverb, ejaculation, and even in the middle of another word!!). The last led to his favourite English expression for years: in-fucking-credible!

In both cases, the people learning the words did not see them as profanity, but as a part of the colourful expression of English. In large part, the frequent use the more common curse words has stripped them of a lot of their prurient content, reducing the emotional impact of their usage. We need to stop that trend, and move back to a time where certain words were sacrosanct, and used ONLY for the purpose of offending proprieties. I want a return to Victorian English, when you KNEW when you were being insulted!!

 

greywolf, your point is exactly why I try to limit my use of profanity. If the people who spend time around me hear me blurt expletives, they know that shit just got serious.

 

shit!

 

My vocabulary is pretty fucking vulgar. I try to tone it down, I'll rarely be the first one to let the f-bomb fly; but once it does ...

 

When I was very small, my parents really censored themselves around me, to the point where our house must've sounded like a "Peanuts" cartoon, with people going "rats!" and "good grief!" But I took to profanity early, around my friends, because I just loved those words. Such small, short words, but so able to be packed with emotions. And when I really understood sex, I loved the word "fuck," because I loved fucking-- the idea of it, the descriptions of it, the feeling of it, the action of it. I never really understood why "fuck" was such a "bad" word, or why a person would tell someone they didn't like to "get fucked." Fucking rocks! Who wouldn't want to get fucked? And as for "fuck off," that was my favorite pastime as a kid! I can still remember being around 12 and having another kid tell me, on my way home from school, "fuck off," and replying, "thanks, I will as soon as I get home!"

Our "profanity" is some of our most colorful and interesting language. I am a big fan of it. And words like "fuck," "cunt," "cock," "shit," and "piss" have such a distinguished history, going back to Middle English and Anglo-Saxon, where they were apparently used with relish and without shame. I still remember my delight in learning the "Cuckoo Song," the oldest scored song in the English language, in whose second verse it describes summer with the imagery "bulluc sterteth, buc verteth" ("the bull leaps, the buck farts"): it's earthy in the best sense of the term, raw and natural and free of judgment.

Granted, I also don't believe in using profanity disrespectfully to people-- at least, not to people who haven't really deserved it. And even then, I can probably count on both hands the times in my life when I have actually cussed out someone to their face, in anger, who isn't a close friend. Even in traffic, I'll curse a blue streak if my window is up, but if the window is down and I'm actually yelling something at someone, it's more likely to be a curse in classical Hebrew than in English. Although once, when I got cut off by an ultra-Orthodox guy, he nearly hit a parked car when I yelled at him the Hebrew equivalent of "O thou vermin who cuttest off! The cursed plague upon thee, and upon all the generations of thy seed also!" It might've been safer just to yell "Fuck you, asswipe."

As a new parent, I've been discussing with Mrs. Levite how we're going to handle the profanity issue, and we've both resigned ourselves to having to do some self-censorship around the boy, once he begins to learn language, until he's old enough to grasp the concept of not using certain words in school, or at synagogue, or with people he is not good friends with, or using them disrespectfully to people. But we also realize that it would be hypocritical of us to pretend we don't swear, or that we think profanity is bad, or to keep these words from our son once he is old enough to grasp not using them in inappropriate contexts.

 

I don't think that any word should be censored and I don't care. It is one of the silly things we waste money on in this country.

But, to be a upstanding person in a respectable career, you have to know how to not say certain things.

 

Same here, I totally agree.

 

Go frak youself.

Also:

...

Current and former military guys, construction workers and anybody that grew up listening to SOD are cursed with an inability to not work a fuck or shit or damn or _today's favorite expletive_ into nearly any sentence regardless of whether or not such language is necessary to make a point or even appropriate given the particular setting. Me? I'm really working to cut it out of my verbal diet but it's been extremely difficult. It's far more rewarding to insult people using verbal judo than simple cussin'.

...because "Fuck you!" doesn't feel nearly as good if they aren't physically intimidated by you.​

 

Hey, Rob Swanson is never wrong.

Actually, I'm totally for paying lots of taxes and getting lots of services... but we can't seem to get those fucks in charge to fucking use them fucking correctly.​

 

Huh? You're running for political office? Wait, what are we talking about?​

 

I DON'T KNOW! But, seriously: Are you going to run for office? I feel like even though you disagree with a lot of my traditional Cimmerian values that--overall--society would benefit from a term or two under your benevolent, always-grammatically-correct rule.​

 

I want to party with you.

 

Fuck that fuckin' shit. That fuckin' shit is fucked.