Why Do Educated People Use Bad Words?

raptoravatar:

tristn:

number-six:

eush:

Tony McEnery, a professor of English language and linguistics at Lancaster University in Britain:

The campaigns of the late 17th and early 18th century that linked bad language with moral degeneracy, low education and general brutishness were incredibly successful in forming views of bad language that endure in the English language to this day. They were also successful at establishing the nascent middle classes of the English speaking world as a locus of purity and hence a locus of power.

Now follows a gratuitous use of the word ‘fuck’.

Class it up a little: “Le fu—.”

I’m an educated person; this is why I say dang nabbit.

I use profanity to give other people time to consult the dictionary about the words on either side of the cuss in question.  It’s either that or deliberately lulzy infantilization and I’ve probably abused the word “totes” far too much for this lifetime, someone needs to split the difference and make the ragetoon construction of “fuck” more linguistically versatile.

I swear (profusely) because it is often the most appropriate use of language given the situation. Language is, of course, about conveying meaning and nothing does this better than profanity. In terms of visceral impact there is no better means of briefly and succinctly conveying meaning than most cuss words. The campaign(s) against using profanity is in some ways a pervasion of that meaning conveyance. Instead of conveying the meaning of what is said, what is said becomes a signifier of the speaker. This is somewhat analogous to the way “code shifting” operates in linguistics and is therefore easily manipulable if you merely aware of how you are speaking. Moreover it presupposes a static view of language, one that is only concerned with how one learned to speak rather than what one is still learning. Language as it continues to evolve often necessitates the adoption of constructions and vocabulary that were previously considered gauche or de classe. As much as I love the linguistic wizardry of Falstaff (Bloom posits him as Shakespeare’s belief in the unlimited ability of language to create and destroy meaning), eventually one needs to get to the doing and in that sense profanity is the Hamlet of language.  

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   I swear (profusely) because it is often the most appropriate use of language given the situation. Language is, of...

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14. permanentsix reblogged this from eush and added:

    Class it up a little: “Le fu—.”

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