Language and its naughty bits.

It is established by culture. Pretty much everything is.We are taught that certain things fit in in specific places. Other things do not.You might say that culture is an agreement to treat things in a common manner so that we don't get all confuzzeled.Subcultures do the same thing, but with a larger culture.All of this is within the province of Anthropology--the study of culture.

So anyone you ask will offer no good reason they are offended if I say "what the fuck" but not offended if I say "what the fudge"? The answer will always boil down to "those words are just bad, mmkay"?Also: at what point did this become so? What could have caused societies to do this?Edited by hooah212002, : No reason given.

Definitely a valid point and a good lead on the reason why certain terms may be determined to be taboo.At the same time, those precise subject matters have multiple terms assigned to them, some of which are taboo and some of which are acceptable. The question being explored here, I think, is why some terms are acceptable while others are taboo.Back in the mid-1970's, Dr. Demento on his radio show played a song about the "four-letter words", in which the lyrics would explore all kinds of euphemisms while suggesting the one term that is totally unacceptable with a line like (remembered from decades ago, since I can't find that particular cassette tape right now):

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{after describing different euphemisms for "breast"}
But by Ravalade's beard she will throw several fits
if you refer to them roundly as good honest ...
{chorus}
Four-letter words, the four-letter words ,
you never know what it must mean
We'd rather be known for our ... ways
than immoral, impure, and obscene.

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If you want to discuss sex or excretion or a number of other subjects, you have acceptable terminology that you can use. And yet there is also terminology that you cannot use. Why is that? That is the question, I think. There are many things that cannot be said or discussed in polite company.Like religion or politics.To quote what a forum member (I forget who) has posted:

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Religion is like a penis.
It's nice to have one and you can spend all day admiring how large and powerful it is.
Just don't whip it out in public or try stuffing it down everybody's throat.

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Which some have modified it to fit the creationism issues with "stuffing it down my child's throat"
Though there can be a difference between what one may or may not utter in polite company and terms that are just plain considered taboo. This leads us along the same paths as in the questions about universal elements in human morality. Certainly, one may argue, there must be some common factor to account for such universals.While JWHWists such as yourself want to claim that that comm0n factor is your god, YHWH, in reality the common factor is human nature. All cultures must deal with the same basic issues because they all deal with the same common denominator, humans. The details in the solutions that they have arrived at can and will vary widely from one culture to another. Same basic problems; different responses to and solutions for those same basic problems.Cultural explanations are the correct ones for specific cases. Cultural explanations are perhaps not sufficient to explain why such cases need arise.

Yes, that is what I am after. Yes, that too.

That's no mistake, but only more reason to examine the phenomenon from a cultural/anthropological perspective rather than a more rigid linguistic one.Jon

Why are some edible things food while others are not?Why are some tame animals acceptable pets while others are not?Why are some body modifications okay while others are not? Wikipedia - TabooWikipedia - ProfanityDoes any of that help?

We are operating here at a distinct disadvantage: we all speak English. Which basically derives from the same original culture. It has been said that Eskimos have a hundred words for "snow" (untrue), but equally so it's been said that the English have a hundred words for "fuck" (untrue, but not by anywhere near the same margin). What is it like for all the other languages and cultures? Who here can speak for that?In the summers of 1973 and 1974, I worked in West Germany as a Werkstudent*. In the first one, I worked alongside a German supervisor who was a young sailor in WWII and was captured in the Mediterranean when he was about 18. Next thing he knew, he was in a POW camp in Arizona growing cotton for the duration. Like all the other Germans I met who had been in the war, the only American English most of them knew was "You god-damned fucking Nazi boy!" All of them took that in stride, but they were all surprised when they learned what "fucking" meant. It made absolutely no sense to them! The first 3 weeks I worked at a job site, the second three in the pre-formed concrete yard which is where I met that Arizona sailor. In the day's start we moved the work-area roof out of the way so that the previous day's pre-formed concrete could be lifted out and stacked by crane, after which we prepared the form and poured the next pre-formed concrete piece. As we would push the roof away (the "building" was on a railroad track), he would channel his old American guards and yell out, "Put your backs into it, you fuckers!" Only he would substitute the German work for "fucker", which is "Bumser!", at which point the German workers would look at him like "What the Schei are you talking about?" You see, in German culture, "fuck" doesn't mean anything, whereas most cursing involves the word for shit, which is "Schei". A close synonym is "Dreck"**, which means "filth", so I got a good laugh from a co-worker on the construction site when we had typical Black Forest post-rain clay-mud conditions and I commented, "Scheiedreck!".While there can be and are certain universal constants in morality and taboos, there are also many differences. So how much of what we try to discuss here, being English speakers, is universal and how much is specific to English?For example, a Hispanic gesture of an out-reached hand, cupped up, with all fingers pointing up, means "lazy". It means that you are so lazy that you need somebody else to hold your testicles up for you. I remember a female friend of ours in a discussion of that gesture making it and immediately being very embarrassed. By the same token, with the word for chicken eggs that you eat, "huevos", also being used to indicate male testicles, I've read that proper girls order "blanquitos" ("little white things") for breakfast.Culture not only dictates what words to use and to not use, but also different cultures provide different lists of such words.* FOOTNOTE: "Werkstudent" == "student worker." In Germany, a Werkstudent is a university student who is in a special tax status. It's kind of a way for the government to subsidize university students. At the time, German workers had three weeks of vacation in the summer and another three weeks in the winter. And companies would coordinate vacation time so that half the work-force would be off for the first three weeks and the other half on the next three weeks. This roughly six-week would coincide with the university students' breaks between semesters. As a result, the students would go to work for German companies and work tax-free in order to build up their funds to finance themselves through the next semester. At the same time, the half of the usual work-force would serve as a cadre that would train and supervise the Werkstudenten.
In my case, Lufthansa acted as an intermediary between foreign universities and the West German government's Zentralstelle fr Arbeitsvermittlung (Central Office for Work Applications -- ?). I was a German major at the time and one of our professors was the liaison (apologies for the French word there) with Lufthansa, so in 1973 I worked for a construction company in Villingen-Schwenningen and in 1974 I worked for Daimler-Benz in Sindelfingen.
No idea whether such a program still exists.** FOOTNOTE: Dreck
That exists in Yiddish as well, what with Yiddish being a dialect of German.
Serving as Board Secretary for my Unitarian-Universalist church, one member serving in the clean-up committee (not their official name, which I forget), came to us requesting an Oreck vacuum cleaner to take care of the stairways, which was approved. Later on while I was serving on a painting detail preparing to move into our new facilities, I saw her with a vacuum cleaner on a shoulder strap and, not remembering her request at the Board Meeting, I read the side of the vacuum cleaner without my glasses and I couldn't help wondering why a vacuum cleaner would be called "Dreck".

Here's another aspect to consider. Social status.English is a weird one. What exactly is it? It is a linguistical bastard!Early about two millennia ago, Germanic tribes, the Angels and the Saxons, migrated into the British Isles. To that, add in the influence of Vikings from Denmark, AKA the "Jutes". The combined language that they spoke was ... wait for it ... wait for it ... Anglo-Saxon. Or what is more properly known in universities as Old English.So what's the history on "Old English"? It was widely spoken until some minor tiff occurred in 1066, when Norman William the Bastard decided that he wanted to lend some credence to a claim that he thought that he had. Well, as is most often settled in such tiffs, the one who won on the battlefield is the one who was right.So in 1066, the ruling class was speaking French (never mind that they had been Vikings who had settling in the north of France, but then their children ended up speaking the language of their mothers and not of their fathers, so they all ended up speaking French), while the rest of the population continued to speak the old Anglo-Saxon.Ever hear the term "Two-dollar word"? That derived from the simple fact that there are at least two words for the same thing, the common every-day word and the fancy, high-falutin' "two-dollar" word. In most such cases, the common word is of Anglo-Saxon origin while the fancy word is French. This is what happened. The language of the court, the "polite, proper" terms were French, while the language of the peasants was Anglo-Saxon. Polite language was French, while coarse, unacceptable language was Anglo-Saxon. And what label do we continue to use for crude, coarse English speach? "Anglo-Saxon."How big are different languages' vocabularies? Or as the German says literally (Wortschatz), "Word Treasures". Here is one list that I had heard from the "verbivores" on San Diego PBS Radio, Richard Lederer in particular:

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English 616,00
German 185,00
Russian 130,00
French 100,00

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Out of that same broadcast was this number: "about 25% of modern English vocabulary comes from Anglo-Saxon."Look at English. From its very beginning following 1066, it was two different languages merging in to one. At one point, what determined which words you would choose to use? Social status. Part of language is social status. A college snack-bar friend had been learning various languages in the old-fashioned manner, but learning from the person you are sleeping with. He said that when he used some Chinese, the guy looked at him and said, "You learned that from a woman." People of different social status will use the language according to their social status.If you are of the superior social class, you will use the language of that class, which in English was the courtly language, French. If you were of the inferior social class, you used "Anglo-Saxon."Look at most English "taboo" words. Anglo-Saxon or French? In most cases, I would assume that they are Anglo-Saxon.

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As a footnote of advisement for English-speaking students of foreign languages, take French. The reason I advise this is because your vocabulary studies will be so much easier. Not only that, but your English spelling will improve immensely. Think of all those English words that end with (phonetically) "uble" or "unce". They all sound the same in English, having been reduced to a "schwa" (an unaccented "uh"), but in French they're still pronounced differently. So learn the French pronounciation for all those "uble" and "unce" words and you will immediately know how to write them in English!Quelle bonne fortune!And keep in mind that I love German and Spanish far more than I do French.

I doubt the cultural differences are going to amount to much. German has "Schwanz" which according to a site about German curse words is used something like the English "prick," and Yiddish has "Schmuck" which has more or less the same meaning. For some reason they don't have an equivalent to the f word but nevertheless all their words fall into the same basic category, having to do with bodily functions from the waist to the thigh, which, again, is the part Adam and Eve covered with their fig leaves.I guess I could have continued the research by checking out curse words in other languages, maybe later.Yes, you can talk about the same actual physical things in a more or less acceptable way so it remains a question what makes the unacceptable ways unacceptable.But I'd suggest that it all has to do somehow with our animal nature, as if we are ashamed of it in spite of ourselves. What demonstrates that nature more tellingly than the sexual and excretory parts and functions? And that goes with the Adam and Eve account, since the Fall was all about losing our spiritual life that connected us with God and becoming mere "flesh" or falling into the animal qualities of our existence.So, maybe I can't exactly explain it either, but I'm suspecting it's a version of the same feeling that led Adam and Eve to cover up with the fig leaves. So when you use the particular taboo curse words that refer to that part of the body and its functions, especially using them in namecalling which is probably the most common form of it, you are invoking their shame as mere animals, accusing them of being animals or something along those lines. Even saying "s..t" or "f.." when you hit your finger with a hammer can be calling yourself something like "stupid" by invoking your animal nature.Perhaps, also, the current push to "let it all hang out" and try to overcome the tabooness of the taboo by shouting it all from the housetops, is an attempt to justify the belief born of evolutionism that all we ARE is animals. Hm? Is it working? Are we really now happy being mere animals?I think I'm on to something here. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

That... was awesome. Thank you VERY much for that. It makes a great deal of sense, I think.

That might explain which language we take the curse words from, but it doesn't explain why all the languages have curse words in the same basic category of reference to sexual and excretory functions.

The key word there would be we. Who are we? English speakers only, neh? (using the Japanese) Or all of humanity?So as we seek to learn from which languages we derive our "curse words", exactly what question does that answer? Where all of humanity derives its "curse words"? Or merely where English speakers derive theirs?Of whom are we speaking here? English speakers only? Or all of humanity?

In response to your argument about social status and the different languages that fed modern English I should have stuck to identifying "we" as current English speakers.But when I'm talking about my idea that it may all have derived from the Fall I'm talking about all humanity and am supposing that all languages make use of the same category for their curse words.

IOW, you have nothing constructive to say.Duly noted.

Excuse me but so far I'm the only one who has pointed out what appears to be the universal content of taboo words and offered an explanation for them. Certainly you object to my explanation out of sheer religious prejudice, but it's still an explanation and you have offered none.All you have ventured to explain is why perhaps English speakers use Anglo-Saxon taboo words instead of the French versions brought to England in the Norman invasion, now lower class versus upper class versions of the taboo words.You may be right about that but it has nothing to do with 1) why we have taboo words at all, 2) why the taboo words apparently universally refer to certain body parts and functions.If you think I'm at least right about their referring to certain body parts and functions, then why don't you offer an alternative theory of why that might be so? I like my own theory of course but perhaps there is another you could come up with. Give it a good old- fashioned evolutionist spin.AbE: I do think it interestingly suggestive that the Adam and Eve story DOES appear to offer an explanation for this sort of thing.Just as it offers an explanation for why human beings just about universally wear clothing. I know there are some that don't, but they are rare, and even among the nearly-naked the parts that are most certainly covered are the genitalia. Why is that? Don't you think it interesting that those are the parts Adam and Eve are said to have covered after the Fall?And again, that those are the parts that are the content of all the taboo words? Hey, here's a website that gives "swear words" in a long list of languages. I only checked a few but yes, the majority refer to genitalia and excretion, with a few including "shut up" -- which in some cases has a derivation in the nether body parts interestingly -- and versions of "idiot."
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