<div dir="ltr"><h1>Power and politeness: key drivers behind profanity and self-censorship [excerpt]</h1>
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In Praise of Profanity </h2>
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By <a href="https://blog.oup.com/authors/michael-adams/">Michael Adams</a> </li><li class="gmail-right">
<time datetime="2017-09-30">September 30<sup>th</sup> 2017</time> </li></ul>
<blockquote><p> Social conventions determine why we use profane
language. The deliberate use (or avoidance) of profanity is often a
socially conscious decision: self-censorship may be driven by
politeness, while profane language may be used to establish a sense of
power. The following shortened excerpt from<a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/in-praise-of-profanity-9780199337583" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> <em>In Praise of Profanity</em></a> by Michael Adams takes a look at the connotations behind of profanity and analyzes the social drivers behind its usage.</p></blockquote>
<p><em>Politeness </em>is the linguistic term for the philosopher’s moralized <em>manners</em>, while <em>etiquette </em>is
the mere and perhaps not very reliable expression of politeness or
manners. Much more is at stake in manners and politeness than in
etiquette, though when confronted with a dozen forks at a fancy dinner,
etiquette may seem, for the moment, a life-and-death matter.</p>
<p>Sometimes those inclined to proscribe profanity are more concerned
with etiquette than with manners. I don’t feel it a breach in manners
when a truly frustrated person says “Shit!” Indeed, I may recognize the
frustration, sympathize with the person, and experience relief when I
hear the profanity. The frustrated person and I share moral aims and I
have to make some room for the expression of authentic feeling.</p>
<p>Still, saying “Shit!” may violate a social convention and even if it
doesn’t, even if conventions are changing and different auditors gauge
the authority of conventions differently, exclamatory profanity
nonetheless rubs some “fragile sensibilities” the wrong way. What if
your negative face merely wants peace and quiet, or to be spiritually
undisturbed? Is someone else’s frustration—when expletively expressed—
an imposition on those who unexpectedly witness it? And should we avoid
profanity in order to save others’ faces rather than threaten them?
These are all reasonable questions, especially if one is cautious about
answering them absolutely, because the rules are complex and flexible.
In some situations, <em>bitch </em>isn’t face threatening—it’s hard to imagine when <em>cunt </em>isn’t—and <em>Fuck you </em>can
be endearing, an expression of intimacy or solidarity, rather than a
challenge, said to the right person, for the right reason, in the right
tone.</p>
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<p>Can’t we all just get along? Surely, we can negotiate our way through
our myriad, often competitive needs and desires. Surely, we can find
room for strong expression but in less obtrusive forms of speech.
Perhaps the very frustrated person could say—as some people do—“Sugar!”
instead of “Shit!” Everyone sidesteps a steaming heap of scatology, and
no one need take offense. Euphemism compromises strong expression but
insists that speakers can say some version of what they want to say. You
can avoid saying, “So, your grandmother’s dead” by saying “So, your
grandmother kicked the bucket,” though a dysphemistic euphemism like
that is likely to threaten a lot of faces, not least grandmother’s
posthumous one. But “So, your grandmother’s gone to a better place” gets
the death idea across while giving it a positive spin and threatening
no face at all. <em>Sugar! </em>isn’t <em>Shit! </em>in expletive force,
but it’s at least some sort of release—it expresses frustration as
well, some would argue, as politeness allows.</p>
<p>Who can argue against being polite? We interpret politeness as
private virtue in the public interest. In general, we follow the
principle Edwin L. Battistella advances in his elegant book, <em>Bad Language</em>:
“Avoiding coarse language in public signals an understanding of the
boundary between public and private discourse and a tacit acceptance of
that boundary.” But politeness can be put to complex and, if not
malignant, certainly not benign social purposes—power takes advantage of
our “tacit acceptance.” The linguistic category politeness may be
universal, but profanity isn’t universally or historically framed as
impolite. The question arises under certain conditions, as Tony McEnery
argues in <em>Swearing in English: Bad Language, Purity, and</em> <em>Power from 1586 to the Present</em>, and he lays them out as follows:</p>
<p style="padding-left:50px">[M]odern attitudes
to bad language were established by the moral reform movements of the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries . . . [and] were
established to form a discourse of power for the growing middle classes
in Britain[, and] . . . the moral and political framework supported by a
discourse of power can be threatened by the subversion of that
discourse.</p>
<p>Thus, the motive for euphemism may be a matter of manners, but
manners may be a means of social subordination, and language policy
deriving from manners may end up serving the interests of the few rather
than those of the mass of speakers.</p>
<p>In the end, whether it’s a matter of deliberate language policy or
just the sort of self-censorship we administer when we understand the
limits and know we’re going too far, language use conforms to parameters
imposed by power. So, Bourdieu says, symbolic power does not reside in
‘symbolic systems’ but . . . is defined in and through a given relation
between those who exercise power and those who submit to it. . . . What
creates the power of words and slogans, a power capable of maintaining
or subverting the social order, is the belief in the legitimacy of words
and of those who utter them. And words alone cannot create this belief.</p>
<p>In other words, the “problem” isn’t profanity or euphemism, but the
interests outside and beyond them that govern value in social markets.</p>
<p>When we swear, we create and enact power, which is, indeed, related
to extralinguistic power, and that power—the nonlinguistic
kind—certainly shapes language use but it also simultaneously depends on
it. The notion that the power of words and slogans either maintains or
subverts the social order doesn’t account for the complexities of
profanity. When the vice president uses profanity to construct his
relationship to a senior senator, is he maintaining or subverting the
social order? Both, it seems to me, and would he have said what he said
if saying it had been irrelevant to his extralinguistic power? Isn’t
saying it a proof of that power, but also a sign of weakness, in the
sense that the power needs proof? In profanity, as well as in euphemism,
linguistic and extralinguistic power interact, and the point of
profanity might well be to draw our attention to interaction we overlook
in commonplace discourse.</p><p><a href="https://blog.oup.com/2017/09/power-politeness-key-drivers-behind-profanity-self-censorship-excerpt/">https://blog.oup.com/2017/09/power-politeness-key-drivers-behind-profanity-self-censorship-excerpt/</a><br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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