My grandfather used to say, “If you have to swear, it means your vocabulary is not large enough”. As did my mother. Thus last week we had a discussion about the strength and purpose of swear words across cultural boundaries.

They should be used BECAUSE people notice them, and because they have power. There is no good replacement for the word fuck. But you’re right that people should be inured to swear words to certain certain swear words. Words like Faggot, dyke, nigger, slurs that put a specific group of people down; Nigger has been mostly reclaimed, though sometimes as Niggah, and faggot is one it`s way, as is dyke to an extent. Otherwise those words will always hurt, even with them inured they still may… But fuck, and the others (maybe not cunt, as it could be included in the type above) have a purpose and we might not want them to be totally inured. Even if they were they would just get replaced by a different set or a new phrase.

It’s happened in the past. One of the worst curses you could say to someone in the 14th and 15th century (Thanks to Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist, whose book The Stuff of Thought, has an entire chapter, at least, dedicated to their purpose.You can borrow it if you want, though parts of it are dull..) Back to the point, the curse phrase was “Kiss the cunt of a cow”, cunt is still a curse word, though it fell out of use for a bit, but that sentence would be seen as farcical. A better example, of falling out, is Hell or damn, which are marginal curse words, for most people, at best.

One of my roommates and bestfriend in MTL, James, and I were discussing curse words cross cultures yesterday. For example, in lots of Chinese languages a curse is made by using a female-ancestor and a part of genitalia (usually male); in lots of East Indian languages incest is the greatest insult. It’s really interesting to look at disphemisms as they’re called, the opposite of euphemisms.

Anyway, I like reading your posts because they always make me think.

Hope you have a good weekend!