this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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Moat words don't serve value. We could get rid of a decent sized portion of our dictionary of we wanted to. But we keep them because they still serve a purpose.
If I tell you I threw the red ball, you didn't need to know it was red. But you can get a little bit more of an image of the story I am telling you by throwing it in there.
"But curse words are different!"
Why? I ask this all the time, and I have never had anyone give me a good answer as to why fuck is bad. I can say fudge to replace it, and suddenly its. Fine. I'm saying the same thing with the same attitude and the same intent, but I just switched it out for something that sounds different so that we all know what I'm saying without actually saying it. So why is fuck a bad word?
I think it's because that's the purpose of swear words. To be the bad words. It's how language develops. And there are benefits to having some bad words. It allows you to choose your level of formality, to signal familiarity or emotional state. They even apparently live somewhere else in your brain and swearing actually reduces pain to some degree.
Which for me then raises the question of: Do we have evidence these were created to be BAD? I'm not necessarily talking about FORMAL. While I'm not a very formal person, I can at least understand the reason there is a more formal way of talking. But formal would basically just be a more proper way of using the language without any form of slang. Using slang would still be seen on another level from swear words.
So what makes the word fuck bad? Even when not in a formal environment some people will get upset over swear words, but not only people speaking in a casual manner. Why? What sets apart the word fuck from other words?
You can triangulate the issues if you look at a variety of languages. They’re linguistic taboos. In English and German they tend to be sexual or involve private biology in some way. In French they’re religious words that should be held in high regards being used in profaning ways. In Scandinavia it’s diseases one would rather not have. These are words that we set aside for some reason to not use in casual ways at one point and then we use it as an easy taboo to break
At an old job I said something in the work chat like "for fuck's sake, it returns 200 OK when there's an error!"
One of the managers responded "language, please."
So me, an asshole, started using "fudge" instead of "fuck" everywhere. "That endpoint is fudged up and we should change it".
They "let me go" a couple months later, but now I make twice as much money doing more interesting work, so that worked out. They can go fudge themselves.
To actually answer, I imagine for some people it calls up imagery of fucking, and that makes them uncomfortable. But that seems like a them problem. I'm not very sympathetic on that explanation.