swearing

Maybe you recall on the fourth of the Alien films -the one set on the penal colony full of wierd fundamentalist Christians- the convicts although professing a religious faith swore quite a lot and this was explicitly okayed on the basis that it was not blaspheming. I was brought up in a household where swearing was disaproved of and to this day the only time I swear is when it is an expressing of the most extreme anger or distress [so about twice a year on average!]. Now I see this as a personal/cultural thing because, as a linguist I had long arrived at the point where I saw things like at 'BadChristian':
"Their vulgarity is completely a cultural construct. These words don't derogate any group of people. Most often they refer to fecal matter or sexual function. I don't believe that limiting my vocabulary to words deemed culturally acceptable makes me any more holy".
I actually agree, though associating swearwords with potential holiness is a piece of mental flexibility I have yet to attain at a gut-level. For this reason I wasn't all that shook up about the language on the Jerry Springer-the Opera programme. I've been in circles where that kind of language is normal and I can't really condemn people for speaking in the idiom and style to which they have become accostumed and are known in. In fact in terms of what seems to lie in the heads and hearts of the speaker it seems to me that far more unrighteousness is possible behind mild words such as "Get lost" than might be behind "F**k you!" [See: I can't even bring myself to write it!]. Echoes of Jesus' words about murder in the heart and 'it's not what what goes into of your mouth .... unclean' might be as easily in our culture 'it's not what comes out of your mouth...'

Where I draw the line is speech that is contemptuous or belittling of others [including much so-called humour] and of God. For the rest I would say that it is better not to swear because it offends some, perhaps many people and it is better to cultivate habits that mean you are less likely to unnecessarily offend others... On the other hand perhaps they need to lighten up ... In my clergy role I constantly deal with people who apologise for their use of 'bad' language. I'm still trying to find the best reply to convey that I'm not offended and that I suffer no great distress from hearing them use those words.

On a more discursive note: I think that a lot of it has to do with culture. On the other hand it is interesting to note how fashions in swearing change. Quite clearly at the turn of the 20th century words like 'damn' were pretty heavy duty -which surprised me a a child because quite clearly they were just a bunch of phonemes to express crossness with something. Words that were considered heavy duty swearing when I was young [eg 'bloody' and 'shit' -this is in the UK] now seem to have a similar status to 'blimey' and 'blast' [both of which were probably 'racy' in their day] and we're finding new [to me] words like 'motherfuck~' and cognates [apologies] to carry force. Now this ongoing evolution seems to point to a factor that is worth thinking about: power to shock; once usage wears it out they start being relatively acceptable and more 'respectable' people use them and so shocking enough words have to be coined to 'exclude' [?is that what's happening?] 'classier' people ...

It's interesting to note that linguistic minority languages, allegedly, often use the swearwords from the 'dominant' language: in Basque the swearwords are Spanish for example; it may have been that the Saxons used Norman French swearwords. perhaps. Though that implies a convoluted history to be using Anglo-Saxon words to swear with now -I guess once the elite started using a Normanised Anglo-Saxon /proto-English then the words most redolant of 'common-ness' would be most likely candidates.

Cross culturally there are interesting issues to be looked at: I am told that Russian, at least in the Soviet era, used 'hell' [khui] as one of the worst swearwords; atheist regime and all. Swedish is reputed to use words connected ith the devil to swear with ...

It seems to come down to what counts as shocking to the 'respectable' in English that is the key factor. And 'not /respectable' is a pretty culturally shaped concept.
a badchristian blog... - the swearing thing: