swear word

[victor steinbok]

I can't speak as to the spelling, as this was a live transcription. But I
certainly agree with the rest of the analysis. I suppose, one would also
have to add "cuss words". I'm also not sure where "profanity" would fit
vis-a-vis "obscenity".

VS-)

PS: Is "cuss" a possible product of word-avoidance from "curse".

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 4:29 AM, Damien Hall <D.Hall at kent.ac.uk> wrote:

>
> Victor said:
>
> "From one of the Christmas episodes of The Vicar of Dibley (still being
> rerun
> on PBS):
>
> Choir leader: Why is Jesus special?
> Boy: His name is a swear word?"
>
> Presumably this was to note the use of 'swear word' and not 'curse word'
> for blasphemous language / an obscenity?  'Swear word' is the usual BrE
> lexeme for these things - so much so that, when I went to the States, I
> found the AmE term a strange description of 'shit', 'fuck' and other
> obscenities that weren't blasphemous, and I still do.
>
> Some raw ghits (these search-terms in sites in the domain .uk):
>
> Swear word - about 158,000
>
> Swearword  - about 106,000
>
> Curse word -  about 84,000
>
> Curseword  - about 23,200
>
> So it's not as overwhelming as I thought in favour of 'swear( )word', and
> these figures also speak against my feeling that the usual BrE way to spell
> it was without a space.  Still, the relative popularity of 'swear( )word'
> also comes out clearly here:
>
> http://bit.ly/SwearWordCurseWordBrE_Ngram
>
> Damien
>
> --
>
> Damien Hall

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