The thoughts behind language 
I wrote this in back in 2008, but I thought I’d share again. That’s the advantage of having your own website 
Ok–This concept has bugged me for a while and I was reminded of it the other day. An article came across my news reader and it brought back a bunch of thoughts on the subject.
The curse word ‘Battlestar Galactica’ created
The article basically describes the word “frak”, which you may have guessed is synonymous with the dreaded f-bomb. Examples of its use include “No frakkin’ way” and “motherfrakker”. I’m assuming that the k would be doubled in these instances so that the word wouldn’t rhyme with “rake” when read.
Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert is quoted in the article as saying:
At first I thought ‘frak’ was too contrived and it bothered me to hear it.[...] Over time it merged in my mind with its coarser cousin and totally worked. The creators ingeniously found a way to make viewers curse in their own heads — you tend to translate the word — and yet the show is not profane.
I’ll pose my problem with this as a question. Why isn’t “frak” profane? Everyone who watches the show obviously knows its intended meaning. My grandmother used to do the same thing when I was a wee little lad and I wondered about it then. She would say “sugar” if she dropped something. Obviously, she meant “shit”. Even as a child I knew that.
So why use the euphemism? Your intended thought is well known. As Scott Adams stated, our minds substitute the profane word for the non-profane word almost seamlessly. If our minds do this, why waste the effort to try to cover it up? This exercise is silly. The so called bad words (which I try to keep to a minimum on this site for content filtering reasons) are just that–words.
Words by themselves aren’t inherently good or bad. They’re tools used to describe thoughts. George Carlin said it best–”There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions.”
The word “slope” for example means a deviation from vertical or horizontal or an inclined surface. The same word spoken by a Vietnam War veteran most likely has a different meaning. The word itself has little to do with the significance of the thought.
Ironically enough, I think that the use of proper terminology (particularly in matters of the human body) sounds more vulgar in some instances than the slang terms. For example, which one of these sounds more like questionable language?
- I’ll be there in a little while. I have to defecate.
- I’ll be back in a few. I gotta take a dump.
That’s another thing that bugs me. We can read “Everybody Poops” to little kids but then at some point as they get older the idea of cracking one off becomes vulgar. That’s a rant for another day, though.
Here’s a thought to end this tirade. What if we didn’t put so much emphasis on these so called bad words? What if as a result of that, they fell out of use as expletives. Has anyone ever thought that maybe the reason they’re used as expletives is because they’re supposedly shocking? Are they shocking because they’re bad words, or are they bad words because they’re shocking?
Think about that, bitches.