Danger of Swearing

I've often thought how strange, and perhaps silly, it is that certain words are considered "bad" while they have synonyms that are socially acceptable. For instance once I couldn't help laughing when I heard someone shout to a man that his mother was a female dog and he wanted to mate with him.

But bad words have a purpose that has been damaged by the frequent use of swearing.

It used to be when people felt angry they would let out that feeling by using vocabulary that made them feel they had broken some rules. Perhaps it warned others that they might express their anger in stronger ways if the situation that angered them continued to escalate.

But when people use that kind of language all the time it no longer has any shock value. Now when they become angry they are likely to 'break a rule' by becoming physically violent.

And physical violence is becoming more and more prevalent in our society.

Sometimes it even leads to murders that might not have happened if the perpetrators hadn't already broken the rules about violence without feeling those were extreme. And if they had felt they were breaking rules by swearing then minor violence might have felt extreme enough to release greater anger.

Of course there have always been killings and other violent acts among human beings, but maybe if swearing were not considered normal conversation by so many people there might be a lot less physical violence.

What do you think of this idea?

Bad Words, Etc.

Since my last post, which is about swearing, I've been thinking about what makes certain words unacceptable while others that are literally synonyms, are considered okay. Nobody is likely to be offended by the mention of excrement, and eternal punishment is often mentioned in religious discussions but using other words for those things would be rude.

Once when I heard one man yell at another using words that literally meant "Your mother is a female dog and I want to to mate with you," I couldn't help laughing out loud.

Sometimes perhaps the "bad" words are of Anglo-Saxon origin and the "good" ones are Latin or French based because of the class differences in England during the Middle Ages, but that isn't usually the case. There isn't really much reason for the distinction between good and bad words, it's just a matter of what people agree about.

Come to think of it, that's true of other things, too.

Why should gold be highly valued in so many cultures? Yes, it's rare and pretty, but we can't use it for food, shelter or other things necessary for survival. It made better sense for the Romans to use salt to pay soldiers their salaries.

And money is only valuable because it represents gold but people all over the world now accept it as having worth.

Since humans disagree about so many things I guess its just as well that we do agree about some things, even if only which words are bad.

Swearing

I wonder if the frequency of swearing is one reason why we have so much violence in our culture. When people get angry they tend to express it by stepping outside the bounds of their usual behavior. When polite people only used certain words when they were angry, saying them helped release some of the anger.

But now many people use those words frequently in their everyday conversations, so when they need to express anger by stepping outside the bounds of what's normally acceptable, swearing doesn't provide release. Instead, they release their anger with physical violence.

Of course some people have always done that, just as some people have always used impolite language, but as swearing has become more prevalent in our society, so has physical violence.

Too bad we can't do much to change that.

But we can teach children not to swear. If parents today were to wash their children's mouths out with soap for using dirty words they'd probably be accused of child abuse, but there are certainly other ways of teaching kids to avoid using that kind of language.