Wednesday, March 15, 2017

What a fucking effluvia this is!

I am a very mild-mannered person, really.  But, every time I see the name trump, I fucking want to swear!  It is not me then, right?  The cause of my behavior is clearly this fucking president!

If you have been a reader for long, then by now you know that those previous sentences were a set up to talk about ... why we use those swear words.  After all, I am a dull boring college professor! ;)

This is not really a new topic here.  Remember this post about "piss pot" and "piss proud," for instance?  Or about "assholes"?

I tell ya, there is a lot we need to understand why we use such fucking language.  I suppose my reputation in this has been established, which is why the friend got me a book titled, "What the F"

Source

So, why do we use such shitty language anyway?
Philosopher Rebecca Roache says that as well as the ingredient of offence, swear words tend to have a cluster of other characteristics. We will often use swear words "to vent some emotion", she says. "If you're angry or particularly happy, swearing is a catharsis. Swearing also centres on taboos. Around the world swear words will tend to cluster around certain topics: lavatorial matters, sex, religion."
Ah, crap! ;)

So, the swear words are work with a fucking trinity: "lavatorial matters, sex, religion."
The Times leader writer, Oliver Kamm, author of Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English, says that the swearing lexicon now draws less from religion and more from body effluvia. "There's a hierarchy of effluvia, according to how disgusting we find them in public. 'Shit' is worse than 'piss' which is worse than 'fart' which is worse than 'spit' which is not a taboo word at all. It's an interesting linguistic hypothesis that the taboos relate to how disease-ridden or dangerous or disgusting we find the effluvia themselves."
 Are you thinking what I am thinking?  What the hell is "effluvia", and who in this fucking world uses that?  Google says it means "an unpleasant or harmful odor, secretion, or discharge"  I get it--like what comes out of this fucking president's mouth! ;)


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