You may recall my interest in the linguistics of profane speech with regard to what it may do to help us sort out an ethics of speaking in relation to what is commonly called 'swearing'. Well I came across this rather useful little article looking at the biblical texts usually used to argue against using swear words. The passages I have usually taken to refer to habitually 'dirty talk' and speech likely to arouse impure passions rather than the use of the occasional profanity. I think that the writer (Peter J. Leithart) agrees.
Paul says that our talk should also be free of EUTRAPELIA ("crude joking") but rather full of EUCHARISTIA (the pun in v. 4). As noted above, Paul himself appears to use vulgarities in some circumstances; when he encounters crap, he calls it "crap." And the Bible shows no sign of the embarrassment about bodily functions that we often have. But those uses of language have times and places. Paul says our talk as saints should not be characterized by vulgar words, sexual innuendo and jokes, scatological humor. Many people today cannot utter a sentence without using an obscene word, and that kind of speech has no place among Christians. Especially since Freud, some try to make everything into a veiled sexual reference, and that kind of pervasive double-meaning is also excluded.
Incidently I can't quite work out whether quoting a couple of sentences that Peter writes is okay by his licence, but I think that in any case fair use rules and the conventions of citation mean that this should be okay, partcularly as I quite with approval!
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