I seriously hope you made that up - counting swear words can't be an exciting pasttime.

LOL!!!!! No, I'm not that sad! But I also didn't make it up. They had a counter in the corner of the screen, that went up every time someone said one particular word.

that's very convienient
maybe we should have a poll about who likes South Park??

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by PictureOfFlowers
Wow, what timing! I've just read this post after watching South Park, which tonight contained 162 instances of a certain naughty word!

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Ah, darn them all to hell! I watched the last half of that ep a couple of weeks ago (must have been on Sky) and it was excellent. Today, I decided to pass South Park up in favour of Question Time, because Pink Dawn Primarolo was getting flak. Ack, I can't talk about it...

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by White Hart
(quotes)

I think it depends how vocal the group referred to has been about the insulting nature of the words, and also how seriously society takes their discontent. African-Americans form a substantial sector of American society and fought a very high-profile civil rights campaign in order to have the n-word relegated to its current position. I wonder how many more Oldham and Bradford riots it will take in this country to have a similar effect on a p-word referring to Asians?

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Weeell, I don't think you meant it this way WH, but it's a bit more than how effective an anti-publicity campaign a group has waged against a word.

Though we don't think of words as violent in and of themselves, they certainly acquire violent associations when they're used--and used only--to accompany violence and degradation, so that the word in itself becomes painful. The "n" word was spawned during a 250-year history of slavery and near-genocide, and was used by white people as part of a systematic campaign to maintain apartheid and oppression in America for the next 100 years. It has no positive or even prosaic usage.

The meaning of a word is determined by its widest usage. If I were asked to shout the n-word word at a concert, I'd be uncomfortable because its exclusive usage has been in association with a purposely violent and shameful part of US history. The b-word, the w/h word are generally given more personal meanings; it's never been acceptable in society to apply them to all women, as it has in the past to call all black people the n-word.

Plus, Courtney Love and myself, as women, would have the right, as Jayjay says, to remove the sting of these words by reclaiming them.

I don't disagree with Courtney Love's point that if one term of abuse is horrible, then so is another. I just think the words have different connotations because the history of the words and the people who've been labeled by those words is different.



(Edited by Diandra 22/03/2002 02:42)

i've read somewhere that the F word stands for Fornicate Under Command of the King. which comes from the anglo saxon times when there were more than one king and if your kingdom's armies were given this command you could go around willy nilly sleeping with the opposite kingdom's women!
when you look at the history of our probably most often used swearword it makes it all the less offensive and more humourous!

And...if it was from "Anglo-Saxon times", what do you think that the odds are that it would be an acronym in modern English?

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by nemesis
i've read somewhere that the F word stands for Fornicate Under Command of the King.

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I'd heard something similar to this, but the phrase was 'force unlawful carnal knowledge', i.e. rape. It could tie in with nemesis' theory, as the order could be "'f' 'em all".
Sounds even more unpleasant now doesn't it?

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by Diandra
Weeell, I don't think you meant it this way WH, but it's a bit more than how effective an anti-publicity campaign a group has waged against a word.

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You're right, I didn't come across very well. I was trying to suggest that the perceived offensiveness of an abusive 'swear word' depends on the extent to which society's attitude to that group has shifted since the word was in common parlance. The distinction I was trying to make was between attitudes to different terms of racial abuse: the 'n-word', which is now virtually taboo, and the 'p-word' I mentioned, which is a British term of abuse for people of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, and which, despite being in my view in the same league as the n-word is tolerated far more.

I think this says something about social attitudes to the two groups. The same could probably be said of any abusive term that refers to an entire section of society.

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by Diandra
The b-word, the w/h word are generally given more personal meanings; it's never been acceptable in society to apply them to all women

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Well, unless you're a gangsta rapper

This is understandable, of course. These terms arise out of hatred, which in turn comes out of separateness. You can't hate something that is part of your daily life in the same way you can hate something alien. Given that we all came out of women in the first place it's obviously more difficult for a misogynist to hate *all* women in the way a Mississipi redneck could hate *all* black people, or a Home Counties Tory voter could hate *all* Asians. Hence, there are no equivalent terms of abuse that encompass the entire gender.

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by Diandra
I don't disagree with Courtney Love's point that if one term of abuse is horrible, then so is another. I just think the words have different connotations because the history of the words and the people who've been labeled by those words is different.

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Pretty much what I was trying to say, although I would add that those connotations are constantly changing as society and language develop.

Okay... so is there a quantifiable difference between swearing and abuse?

If I hit my thumb with a hammer I yell a word beginning with F at the top of my voice. That's swearing.

Where I live, there's an occasional fad for racist grafitti. The side of Tesco used to read, in two foot high letters, "the {edited} is an infestation". That's abuse.

I was out canvassing during a by-election and an elderly woman shouted at me: "I'll vote for your lot if you stop the {edited} getting the council houses." That's both swearing and abuse.

Are the rules different? I think they are. Swearing's easy to legislate against because it's about behaviour, and that can be altered: most of the discussion here has been about how to handle abuse, and that's much harder because it's about inbuilt prejudices.

Until we have a policy on swearing, whether within the context of the discussion or not, I'm afraid all swear words/racial slurs are not acceptable. A policy is being worked on. Please bear with us - W

(Edited by Whistler 22/03/2002 20:32)

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by Initiate
Are the rules different? I think they are. Swearing's easy to legislate against because it's about behaviour, and that can be altered: most of the discussion here has been about how to handle abuse, and that's much harder because it's about inbuilt prejudices.

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And then there are the examples that fall between two stools, such as Bob Geldof's exhortation to viewers to "give us your _______ money!", during the Live Aid concert

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by RedWitch
(quotes)

I'd heard something similar to this, but the phrase was 'force unlawful carnal knowledge', i.e. rape. It could tie in with nemesis' theory, as the order could be "'f' 'em all".
Sounds even more unpleasant now doesn't it?

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Yeah - another apocryphal etymology has it as "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge", as an abbreviation of the charge brought against prostitutes. Unlikely to be true. "Fornicate Under consent of the King" is, on reflection, clearly nonsense - apart from anything else, "fornicate" didn't enter English usage until the C16th, IIRC.

After a quick whip-round with some Scandinavian chums I've found cognates in Norwegian and Swedish, which suggests a Nordic rather than Germanic route, probably coming into the language through Scotland...

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by Tannhauser
After a quick whip-round with some Scandinavian chums I've found cognates in Norwegian and Swedish, which suggests a Nordic rather than Germanic route, probably coming into the language through Scotland...

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You guys know how to party huh?

Hey, we got to be truly obscene in most of the Indo-European language families. Don't knock it...

And I thought my ideas of fun were strange?!?!?

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by This post has been temporarily suspended, please bear with us while we work on it

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So work on it, already! All you have to do is asterisk out the n-word, surely?

Oh, and the P-word...

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by Joe
(quotes)
So work on it, already! All you have to do is asterisk out the n-word, surely?

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and people do have jobs

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by Joe
(quotes)
So work on it, already! All you have to do is asterisk out the n-word, surely?

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Satisfied now?

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by nemesis
i've read somewhere that the F word stands for Fornicate Under Command of the King. which comes from the anglo saxon times when there were more than one king and if your kingdom's armies were given this command you could go around willy nilly sleeping with the opposite kingdom's women!
when you look at the history of our probably most often used swearword it makes it all the less offensive and more humourous!

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I'm with Tannhauser on this one. On top of everything else whatever version of the 'it's an abbreviation' theory, they are all descriptions of rape (apart from the prostitution one, which is historically inaccurate), and are hardly 'less offensive and more humourous'.

I was also under the impression that the etymology of the f-word lied in the Angle language, though I don't think there's any definitive finding on this. But this would tie in with the Scandinavian theory.

Going back to the point I made about abusive terms based on gender, it occurs to me that this may be tied in with the whole manner in which women have been oppressed throughout history. There are few words of abuse for women that cannot, in modern times, be applied to men. Those that I can think of also involve abuse towards sexuality. The other oddity is that the word 'woman' is also a very common term of abuse aimed at men by men... Anyway, the thought occurred to me that oppression of women has, mostly, been implicit rather than explicit. Racial abuse has always been very public, with slavery the ultimate example. Sexuality has also been an issue where the abuse is very public, from being outlawed to the modern desire for most men to prove their heterosexuality by beating anyone up who either questioned it or threatened it. Abuse of women has always been .. matter of fact, and not a public affair. From beatings in the home, to emancipation and the right to work, all of this was assumed, rather than publicly stated at regular intervals. Hence the associated language of abuse was never as explicit as the language of abuse for other groups.

I'm reminded of a couple of stories regarding the outlawing of homosexual acts. In the UK, when the law was first drawn up, lesbians were neither mentioned nor was their .. coupling. The story goes that the bill was refused royal assent by Queen Victoria, as she believed that women would never 'do something so disgusting'. The bill was rewritten to mention only acts between two men and was passed into law.

The second is from Nazi Germany. This time, the Nazi's wanted to extend the prohibition against homosexual acts, to the point where two men holding hands would be considered sufficient evidence of homosexuality to be imprisoned in one of the many detention camps. It was originally intended that the law would be equally explicit about lesbians as it would about gay men. However, Hitler demanded a rewrite with women excluded, as it clashed with his 'Three K's' - Church, Kitchen and Schoolyard, as the only environments suitable for women. The idea that women HAD sexuality conflicted too much with this and was not acceptable.

Just two examples I can think of, off-hand, that show how the oppression of women was more implicit (in that it wasn't vocal, or necessarily visible).

(Edited by Jayjay 22/03/2002 22:33)