Profanity
From Free net encyclopedia
A profanity (or "swear word", or "curse word") is a word, expression, or other usage which is generally considered insulting, rude or vulgar. The extent to which a profanity is considered to be in some way disagreeable or objectionable depends on context, timing and various other factors. However, the use of certain profanities at certain times, especially in a public setting or during a solemn occasion, will always be considered inappropriate or in bad taste, if not clearly abusive, obscene or offensive. At other times the use of certain profanities will be considered mild or acceptable, and may take less recognizable forms, such as a minced oath.
The original meaning of the term was restricted to blasphemy, sacrilege or speaking God's name in vain. However, the term has been extended to include expressions with scatological, sexist, derogatory, racist, or sexual themes. Compare the concept of the four-letter word.
The use and meaning of profanity is also culturally-specific. For example, many profanities in Quebec French are a corruption of religious terminology, while many English ones tend to reference sexuality. A term which functions as a profanity in one language may often lack any profane quality when translated into another language.
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Definition
There has always been great difficulty in defining profanity. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission, in response to complaints about a 1973 broadcast comedy routine by George Carlin, called: Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television, ruled that such language could not be broadcast at times of day when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience. The Supreme Court of the United States upheld this act of censorship in 438 U.S. 726 (1978). Despite this definition, people from every race, class and level of education swear. Seventy-two percent of American men and fifty-eight percent of American women swear in public. Most researchers consider these numbers to be in line with other populations worldwide.
Profane words with multiple meanings
Some words are profane or vulgar in one context but completely acceptable in another. Some examples of this might be the word "damn", a relatively mild swear word that often in a religious sense is completely acceptable (although in Shakespeare's time, blasphemous/profane swearing was usually thought of as worse than obscene swearing). Likewise, the word "bastard" can be a mildly profane insult, but was formally used as a term for a legal status, and is presently used for odd-sized machine parts; the latter two uses are acceptable. Or, the words “ass” and “bitch” can also be considered profane swear words, meaning: “a fool” and “a lewd woman”, or the meaning of the word “ass” as that of a donkey, and the meaning of the word “bitch” as a female canine. Also, the word "cock" can refer, as a noun, either to the penis or to a male chicken, and is also a verb with several non-profane uses.
History
Terms of profanity have historically been taboo words. Some words originally considered profane have become much less offensive with the increasing secularity of society, while others, primarily racial or ethnic epithets which can be considered part of hate speech, have become increasingly taboo.
The word cunt maintains much of its taboo status at least partly due to the influence of feminism, though other feminists are attempting to "reclaim" a neutral or complimentary status for this word. Shakespeare hinted at the word in Hamlet, Twelfth Night and Henry V: Hamlet quips about "country matters" when he tries to lay his head in Ophelia's lap; Malvolio has the salacious line "These be her very c's, her u's, and her t's, and thus she makes her great p's"; and the French Princess Katherine is amused by the word gown for its similarity to the French con ("fucking stupid", "asshole")
In the U.S. today, terminology considered to be racist is often seen as more offensive than sexual or scatalogical terminology; this is most clearly shown in the attention given to use of the word nigger, now effectively banned in American public discourse. So strong is the social disapproval aimed at this word, that it has affected use of the unrelated, but similar-sounding, word niggardly (meaning "stingy"). For example, in a highly publicized incident in 1999, the mayor of Washington, DC, Anthony A. Williams, pressed for the resignation of his staff member, David Howard, because Howard used the word "niggardly" in a private staff meeting [1]. As with other types of profanity, context is very important; thus, Americans of African descent might use the word nigger, or the related nigga, in informal situations among themselves, without being considered offensive.
Psycholinguistic studies have demonstrated that profanity and other taboo words produce physical effects in people who read or hear them, such as an elevated heart rate.
This fact is seen by some as evidence that reclaiming of words such as queer is a valid way to remove its power. See also the article on nigger.
The offensiveness or perceived intensity or vulgarity of the various profanities can change over time, with certain words becoming more or less offensive as time goes on. For example, in modern times the word piss is usually considered mildly vulgar and somewhat impolite, whereas the King James Bible unblushingly employs it where modern translators would prefer the word urine (2 Kings 18:27; Isa 36:12) or urinate (1 Sam 25:22, 25:34; 1 Kings 14:10, 16:11, 21:21; 2 Kings 9:8). The word cunt has seen a similar evolution; its ancestor ("queynte") was not considered vulgar at all, but the word is now considered to be among the worst offensive words in the English language.
Severity
The relative severity of the various British profanities, as perceived by the public, was studied on behalf of the British Broadcasting Standards Commission, Independent Television Commission, BBC and Advertising Standards Authority; the results of this jointly commissioned research were published in December 2000 in a paper called "Delete Expletives". It listed the profanities in order of severity, the top ten being cunt, motherfucker, fuck, wanker, nigger, bastard, prick, bollocks, asshole, and paki, in that order. 83% of respondents regarded cunt as "very severe"; 16% thought the same about shit and 10% crap. Only about 1% thought cunt was "not swearing"; 9% thought the same about shit and 32% crap.
Interlanguage
The situation is rendered more complex when other languages enter the picture. Merde in French, and Scheiße in German (both usually translated as shit) are also quite common. It is also interesting to note that while German and other languages' profanity seems to focus on elimination, English profanity tends to be sexual in nature. Likewise, in European Spanish, coño (usually translated as cunt in English) is very common in informal spoken discourse, meaning no more than "Hey!" or "Christ!"
Some scholars have noted that while the French and Spanish are comfortable hearing native speakers use these words, they tend to hear the "stronger" meaning when the same words are spoken by non-native speakers. This may be similar to the differences in the acceptability of queer or nigger depending on who is saying the words. Or it may be an example of how it is easier to learn swear words in a new language or dialect than to learn the fine shades of intensity which accompany their use.
A profane word in one language often sounds like an ordinary word in another. Fuck sounds like the French words for seal (phoque) and jib (foc), or the Irish word for words (focail), as well as the Portuguese language word for knife(faca) or the Romania word for do (I do = eu fac) 'Fuck' also sounds like the Swedish word for union (fack) ; shit sounds somewhat like the Russian for "shield". A particularly interesting case is the Cantonese word for "flower bridge"("fa kyu") which sounds vaguely similar to "fuck you." Even names in one language may appear as vulgar words in another linguistic community, which causes many immigrants to change their names (common Vietnamese personal names include Phuc and Bich). A particular coincidence is the Hungarian and Spanish words for curve: Spanish curva sounds like a Slavic, Romanian and Hungarian kurva meaning "prostitute" (or, more offensively, "whore"), and Hungarian kanyar sounds like coño, mentioned above. See another example in Laputa. Additionally, puta is genitive and accusative case of two often used words in south Slavic languages; but in Portuguese and Spanish, means "whore", and filho da puta (Spanish: hijo de puta) is an offensive word, similar to son of a bitch.
In Finnish, katso merta means look at the sea, but to Italophones it sounds very similar to cazzo merda; cazzo is the English equivalent of cock or dick, and merda means shit. While cazzo merda does not make much sense grammatically (they are just two substantives put one after the other), hearing such a thing would be funny for Italians, to say the least. Even more for Spaniards, since the same sentence, katso merta, sounds just like the offensive expression cacho mierda (piece of shit) in Spanish.
Quebec French can string a few basic terms from Roman Catholic liturgy into quite impressive strings of invective of up to a minute or more. This is known as sacre.
Russia
Profanity took a very interesting form in Russia where there exists a language of sorts called mat, most of its words based on five basic profane roots -- nouns penis, bitch, whore, cunt and verb fuck. At least two hundred derivative words exist in this language, plus countless word combinations. It is possible to sensibly communicate using just these five basic roots. Due to countless very fine nuances (stress on a different syllable changes the meaning of certain words etc.) it is not easy to master that language which is very widely used in Russia, especially in rural areas. Before the 1990s these words never appeared in print (except special articles published in universities) and they remain officially banned on TV and in the movies.
Japan
Japanese is occasionally cited as an example of a language with little or no profanity, but this myth is mostly due to a misunderstanding of the complex system of politeness levels in the language. Common verbs, like "to do" or "to give", have multiple forms conveying various levels of respect, and depending on the context the choice of verb can be offensive: for example, the condescending verb yaru for "to give" is perfectly acceptable when giving food to a dog or watering a plant, but cannot be used towards an equal or superior without serious offense. Similar levels of politeness also apply to pronouns, with some pronouns for "you", including kisama (貴様, "my Lord"), temae (手前, "we/us" (archaic)), "otaku" (Your Respected House, roughly equivalent to the word "thou", but which has come to mean "obsessive nerd" in modern Japanese) onushi (お主, "master") and omae (お前;, "honorable one in front of me") have become offensive due to repeated sarcastic or inappropriate usage. These make it entirely possible to unintentionally gravely insult someone without using any profane words in the Western sense.
However, Japanese does have a number of patently offensive expressions which are banned in all broadcast media and frequently censored in text: examples include manko (マンコ, "vagina") and chinpo (チンポ, "penis"). If used, these and other offensive expressions are commonly printed with the central character replaced by the placeholder sign maru (〇), so manko becomes ma-ko (マ〇コ). This is directly equivalent to writing "fuck" as "f**k". For most parts, these terms carry only their literal meanings and cannot be used as insults per se, but some words like kusottare (糞っ垂れ, "shit-drip") and yariman (やり万, "whore") are strong invective on par with anything found in English. Milder exclamations allowed on TV include baka (ばか, "stupid"), bakayarō (バカヤロー, "idiot") and chikushō (畜生, beast).
Other extremely offensive words banned by the Japanese broadcasting code include mekura (盲, "blind"), tsunbo (聾, "deaf"), oshi (唖, deaf-mute), kichigai (気違い, "crazy"), hakuchi (白雉, moron/retard) and unko/unchi (うんこ/うんち, shit).
Many other offensive words relate to Japan's old caste system. Words such as hinin(非人, nonhuman) and eta (穢多, plenty of filth) refer to the burakumin.
One possible reason offered for the supposed paucity of profanity is of the belief of Kotodama (言霊), lit. word spirits. Kotodama appear when spoken, written, or even thought and they can easily be "tainted" with ill intentions and evil spirits. Even today, Japanese avoid words that imply harm to keep away tainted evil Kotodama. This, of course, can be reversed to bring about harm to someone or something, and common everyday words are used profanely in this case.
Computers
A computer programming language called fuckfuck has been devised using the same idea, based on another computer language known as Brainfuck, which actually has more to do with confusing the programmer (having only 8 operations), hence the name.
The source code for the Linux Kernel contains many instances of the words fuck and shit.
See also
- List of profane words
- Mandarin slang
- Singapore sexual slang
- Spanish profanity
- Gràisgealachd
- Latin profanitycs:Sprosté slovo
da:Bandeord de:Schimpfwort es:Palabrota eo:Sakro fr:Diffamation (droit français) gd:Gràisgealachd nl:Schuttingtaal no:Banneord nn:Tabuord pl:Wulgaryzm pt:Palavrão ru:Обсценная лексика simple:Profanity fi:Kirosana sv:Skällsord th:คำต้องห้าม zh:脏话