Bad words

[James A. Landau]

Replying only to the points I find interesting:

- In your guest editorial you used "German" when "Germanic" or "Anglo-Saxon"
was the correct term.  I think I see why you did it (and I agree with your
decision.)  First, you wanted to shock your readers into doing some thinking
about a subject they had never heard of, and labelling "English" as "German"
is rather shocking.  Second,  your average reader, if pressed, would define
"Anglo-Saxon" as "belonging to the White Citizens Council" and "Germanic" as
"made by Volkswagen."

Where I say that your editorial went wrong (or was a red herring, i.e.
irrelevant) was in your taking the well-documented
pig-cow-sheep/pork-beef-mutton dichotomy and using it as the sole explanation
for a broad range of behavior patterns on the part of English-speaking
people.


In a message dated 7/8/02 10:34:09 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
dcamp911 at JUNO.COM writes:

> "Damn" has always had a
>  use in standard, socially acceptable English. There is a difference
>  between "he was damned to a life of wandering" and "Damn you!" The coarse
>  language of 12th century peasants is mostly undocumented. But I would
>  suspect, with absolutely no academic credentials to support it, that the
>  latter use of "damn" is more closely related to the contemporary German
>  "verdammt," which is pretty much as bad as German gets, than to the usage
>  in etymological dictionaries.

A good point.  How strong is the evidence linking English "damn" to French as
in "ame dammee" rather than to German as in "verdammt"?  I have no idea.


>  >  "Piss" is also from  French---compare the
>  > name of the famous statue "Le Manequin-Pis".

MWCD10 says no, but I wonder if the English euphemism "pee" comes from the
"Pis" above, which I think is pronounced /pee/ rather than /pis/.

>  "bastard" is not in itself a bad word, when used to describe a child born
>  outside of marriage. The aforementioned William was called William the
>  Bastard. As such it is descriptive. The pejorative nature of it comes not
>  from the word or the derivation of the word but from the circumstances.

This is my point, that the local circumstances (i.e. the type of audience,
which in turn implies the applicable set of taboos and the sublanguage to be
used) are far more important than the pig/pork dichotomy that you emphasized.


>  > One major objection:  there are languages which contain "bad words"
>  > but which
>  > do not have English's dual linguistic heritage.
>
>  And I think that would be worth exploring. I know that, as an American
>  living in Gemany and speaking passable German, it was very unsatisfying
>  to try to swear in German. Though you could say things that were
>  insulting, there were simply no words that carried the emotional release
>  of "F--k you!" On a cultural level, the best you might do is something
>  equivalent to "Go piss up a rope."

Yiddish and German are mutually comprehensible languages, yet they are spoken
by people of different cultures.  This, it appears to me, is reflected in
their respective vocabularies of bad words.  As was pointed out on this list,
"hmooze" is a bad word in German but not in Yiddish.  "Shmuck" (which has
both meanings of English "prick") is a bad word in Yiddish.  What about in
German?

In fact we have here one-language-two-cultures, as opposed to English's
two-languages-one-culture.  This should make German/Yiddish a good test bed
for investigating why bad words are bad.


>  > 4.  Canine---bitch, son-of-a-bitch
>
>  Gotta think about that. It is perhaps related to the German use of
>  "schweinhund. "

In an otherwise long-forgotten book, I ran across the following theory:
dogs, since they eat the corpses of people slain on battlefields,  are widely
used as a metaphor for disgust.  Hence German "schweinhund" and Arabic "dog
of an infidel".  However, to Anglo-Saxons the dog was "man's best friend", a
metaphor for nobility and faithfulness.  Hence the Anglo-Saxons, presumably
out of sexism, transferred the degrading metaphor to the female dog, the
bitch, and needing a similar metaphor to apply to a male human, invented "son
of a bitch".

I have no idea of the evidence for this theory---it could be a folk
etymology---but it explains everything plausibly.

>  > 5.  Ethnic slurs---the infamous N-word is the most obvious.
>
>  A whole different situation. It is the cultural situation that makes the
>  words bad, not the derivation.

The last sentence is my point exactly.

>  (!) The religious taboo is very strictly defined: You shall not take the
>  word of God in vain.

               and

>  Well (and here I will make my sole claim of better credentials than the
>  rest of you), no. It is closely related to the "false witness" rule and
>  goes back to an ancient taboo of speaking the name of G*d.

Nobody knows what it is that this Commandment is prohibiting.

On the theory that the purpose of Biblical exegesis is to make the literal
words of the Bible relevant to people today, the best interpretation is that
the Commandment prohibits perjury.  Why then is perjury explicitly prohibited
in the "false witness" Commandment?

Another theory is that the Commandment spells out the "ancient taboo of
speaking the name of G*d."  (or, as you just demonstrated, writing the full
name of the Deity).  This is more than a mere taboo.  The true Name of the
Deity is, in Jewish tradition, a very powerful magical item---e.g. the Golem
legend.  In fact, in Jewish tradition and to a lesser extent in Christian
tradition, the Name of the Deity is the Deity Him/Herself.  Hence the
Christian prayer "The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the Name
of the Lord".

There is a timing problem with this interpretation.  The Ten Commandments
were well-known by the time of Jeremiah, and probably long before.  On the
other hand, the supposedly taboo Name was commonly used enough to have been
picked up by Gentiles---"Yahveh" is the pronunciation recorded on several
Green and Latin documents.

Still another theory is that the Commandment prohibits one from petitioning
the Deity (and what else is a prayer?) without paying out of your pocket for
a priest to perform a sacrifice.  And since burnt-offerings have been a
historical curiousity since the days of Josephus, the only relevance of this
Commandment to modern Christians is "Thou shalt donate to the collection
plate."  (Jews do not have collection plates---they feel it violates the
commandment "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy".


>  > Conclusion:
>  >  "bad language" are those words which are taboo in conversation
>  > among
>  > polite/civilized/proper people.
>
>  Exactly.  The question is, How did they become taboo.

Exactly.

          - Jim Landau