Fucking Bad Words, How Do They Work?

I, uh, have a twitter now. I think it's just a continuation of me pretending to be Wil Wheaton, but @geekyhumanist for those of you who are tweeterereerers.

Today's topic: bad words. What a strange concept. The concept of certain topics being taboo carries its own issues, but profanity is something different. In many contexts, "have sex with" is acceptable, while "fuck" is not. (Utterly irrelevant side note: The English language needs a good transitive non-profane verb for "have sex with." Even "screw" has bad connotations.) Certainly, odd customs emerge in cultures all the time, but the idea of "bad words" seems common in multiple languages across the globe. I am not a linguist, though, so any input I could get on the existence of a language without curse words would be welcomed. I'm just a dude on the Internet making linguistic assertions based on the Chinese swear words in Firefly.

Actually, one class of swear words makes perfect sense to me--despite being the class I respect the least. Blasphemous words, such as "god damn it," make sense. In those cases, the society suppressing the word has reason to believe that those words and those particular patterns of sounds are significant. After all, thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain and all that. It would be like going around Hogwarts, pointing at people and saying "Avada Kedavra!" In our fairly nonmystical modern world, naming magic has fallen out of fashion and with it the idea that the name of God carries special weight or power. Ironically enough, the profanity with the most firm logical basis is now the least powerful. However, some people still respect the power of the Name of God. Orthodox Jews famously write G-d. I have an ex-girlfriend who will raise a polite objection if you say "Oh, God." In retrospect, that ought to have been a bigger red flag than I found it at the time.

It seems that the next "level" of curse words belongs to the excretory family, words that linguists know as the "shitpiss" group. At first blush, I can see the rationale here. I don't really like thinking about shit or piss when I don't have to. (Though, hey, if you're into that kind of thing, feel free.) But when you examine it, we still have some fundamental contradiction here. Again, only social conditioning makes "shit" represent anything different from "crap" or "poop" or "feces." So, again, we have a word with connotations completely and wholly divorced from any actual implied meaning.

Finally, the Illuminati eye crowning the pyramid of obscenity, the sexual/anatomy-based swears, most commonly used by fucking assholes. I imagine children make up most of the reason behind this taboo. We as a society seem to think it's important we maintain a masquerade with regards to the existence of sex, another thing I never entirely understood. In this case, the acts referred to are similarly taboo to discuss in "polite" conversation, whereas religion and biology can generally be approached with some level of maturity and openness in the right circumstances. (Well. Poopin', less so.) Such carnal words also reinforce a very bestial view of humankind that I imagine many people dislike. In a related point, I'd like to note that I was lied to as a child. As a child, I was told that "fuck" was the worst of all bad words. Now, I realize that that title belongs to "cunt," a word so powerful they don't even let you know about it as a kid. It's the forbidden kung-fu technique of swearing, and to this day I reserve "shitcunt" for the worst occasions.

Reviewing this series of impolite words, it seems that the religious and the scatological/sexual have two different origins. Religious issues stem from goddamn ancient mystical baggage, whereas the biological factors just draw our fucking attention to shit we'd rather forget about--our baser natures. Freud would have a field day. If I'd actually read any Frued, I'd be able to comment on whether he actually did.

People deal with these taboos in pretty interesting ways, really. You can downshift your cursing--from shit to crap, from fuck to screw, from god to gosh, and so on--which alleviates the problem despite the fact that you intend nearly or exactly the same meaning. You can censor yourself. Most attempts at censorship, I find hilarious in their ineffectiveness, if only because the real word can easily be guessed, but my absolute favorite variety of censorship would have to be single-character asterisks. Oh, come on. You've seen them. People who think that f*ck differs substantially from its base word. In this case, the intent doesn't need to be inferred, it's right there. Yet somehow, the speaker thinks that they're not "really" swearing.

However, that type of dimwittery does reveal something about swearing. Obviously, the meaning or intent of a swear word has little effect on its actual "curse level." While some differences in phonology exist as well, I don't think we can appeal to the sound of a word, either, or "duck" would be on Carlin's famous list. No, swearing seems to be a speech act. A "bad word" only has power in trangression, and in how much it breaks the rules of society. (Maybe that should have been obvious from the start, but if I'd written it up there, I wouldn't have gotten to coin the term "shitpiss group." Truly, an achievement for the ages.) You know, my mother tried to dissuade me from cussing by explaining to me that smart people can think of better words. Bullshit. Other words don't transgress, and so don't express the right emotional messages. In a weird way, this also explains why our instinctive reaction is to suppress these words among children. We don't want to encourage them to break rules, and we don't want them that social mores have value in being violated. I feel like I should say something about...patriarchy or something, here, but I can barely spell "suppress" anymore, so I'll let you ponder the implication that our language may inherently encourage authoritarian thinking.