Basically, that society's not sex positive (duh!). Here's a good video about the origins of curse words. It's pretty well documented that cursing was religious to start with. In the Bible, the offensive kind of cursing was to curse someone using God's name (also swearing in God's name [often falsely] which is why we have swear words). This belief requires us to believe in some kind of magic within words, that the use of some words has the power to alter physical reality. [Interesting aside: abracadabra epitomises this precisely, one theory being that it's Aramaic for I create as I speak]
Although modern swearing vocab is not religious, this belief in the magic persists; after all how can the mere choice of word make a sentence offensive? There's nothing logical about it, it's magic. Which is not to say that it's "superstitious" and should be stopped; probably human nature and our universal grammar need these outlets for frustrations. What's annoying is that our frustrations presuppose sex-negativity. Yes there's disgust of excretion too, but at least here we were programmed by evolution to find it unpleasant. We weren't programmed to find sex unpleasant I don't think...
Let's look at George Carlin's famous seven words one by one. (Too lazy to look up the OED so I used EtymOnline for origins.)
- fuck: comes from 16th C, seems to have been taboo from the start though it denotes the mere sexual act. Not only does it denote something bad when used by itself but some contexts make the sex-negative nature even more clear. Consider the insurance company really fucked me. This directly correlates sex with harm -- due to no less than an interesting and disturbing lack of conceptual distinction between sex and rape...Of course it's also being disassociated with intercourse to mean a general expletive.:I used it for quite a while in primary school before learning of its association with sex. "I guess that makes sense," I thought.
- shit: has the same root as conscience and science, meaning to separate. Taboo only from 16th C.
- piss: used from 12th C as standard form, then comes the euphemism pee (1788) leaving the original to become taboo. Note my old fave from the King James Bible (a way of describing males): any that pisseth against the wall (1Sam 25:22)
- cunt: since 12 C, always meant female genitalia, obscene since 17th C. This is the supposed to be the worst thing you can call someone. Besides the obvious misogyny of the assumption, a human being's genitalia have no aesthetic value, they simply are. Of course it's often used now as a term of empowerment, regardless of what people think now there's a chance this might lead to it being displaced over the decades/centuries, and I wouldn't be surprised if biology textbooks in say 2208 labelled the vagina as "cunt"...
- cocksucker: couldn't find this one but cock has been slang for a penis since 1618. The same things apply as for the last one except mysogyny. Of course it's still there if you note that it's mostly used as an insult to men (if your personal experience clashes with mine let me know in the comments!). Which presupposes the worst thing for a man is to engage in an action commonly associated with women (or gay men, obviously). Am I starting to detect some kind of pattern here?!
- motherfucker: Carlin himself noted this doesn't really belong taxonomically. I guess this one is an odd one out being related to the incest taboo, which is definitely an evolutionary adaptation (although according to some the origin comes from the idea of fucking someone else's mother).
- tits: a 1928 throwback to an Old English word meaning the same (not sure if it was obscene then, probably not). Similar to cunt and cock. Note a similarity to balls but the latter are also used for the positive trait of courage. Am I detecting some more patterns here? Nah! (It's more rare but people will sometimes say of a woman that she has balls, but common parlance could find no positive traits to associate with mammary glands...)
Other miscellaneous expressions that imply a sex-negative stance (not necessarily taboo):
- to screw someone (over)
- doing the nasty
- wanker/tosser
- an unpleasant person being a dick or a prick
- a coward being a pussy (or is that related to the cat? not sure about the origin, does anybody have any real references?)
- having a dirty mind
- get your mind out of the gutter
- to kick someone in the junk (hat tip Jess)
- pussywhipped (note once again the difference between this one portraying genitalia as enslaving and the somewhat-similar cockteaser)
- ADDED: bollocks (hat tip Alan)
Won't even start with euphemisms for sex...My favourite is the idea of "sleeping with someone", it's almost like coming up with an alternative "acceptable" theory of what happened.
Part 2 coming soon! (ADDED: Here it be.) In the meantime if you could put some of your favourite expletives in the comments (especially additions to the last list) it would really help me out with Part 2.
5 comments ↓
I’ve really noticed a resurgence lately of referring to women as cunts. In recent years it was always something directed at men but it used to be something that was directed at women, as in, “You’re [nothing more than] a cunt”, therefore having no value beyond sex and baby-making. It seems that this usage is making something of a comeback.
You missed out bastard, which is an insult with an understandable history in the taboo of its time.
Does referring to someone as an arse or ass have connections to the sexual or the “disgust of excretion”? Or does that one always depend on context?
One of my all-time favourite and most regularly used expletives is bollocks. Then again, I am English.
I’ll leave it now for some others to add theirs.
By the way, I think you’ve got a bit of unintended transposition going on in your post title.
yep — i proof everything but the title!
adding bollocks — don’t think bastard qualifies as it’s not saying anything negative about sex particularly
ass — i think it would be excretion (but only a hunch)
cunt — i guess this does add an extra dimension but no matter who you insult with it, the implication of genitals-as-negative are the same
I’m not certain your guesses are always justified, e.g. ass. I firstly think that there are: (a) physical properties of arses that make them seem undesirable other than excretion; (b) conflations with the animal “ass”. For example “to make an ass of onesself” is referring to which? ass, or arse?
You suggest “a human being’s genitalia have no aesthetic value, they simply are”… I think you mean that the assigned aesthetics are not objective. Of course human genetalia and other parts of the body have aesthetic value. Aesthetics are socially assigned, and unfortunately for genetalia, the assigned aesthetic are more based on universal function and taboo than on comparative appreciation. I’m sure there are many people who differentiate pretty and ugly genetalia.
And foreigners in Australia get confused by “root” and “stuff”, both euphemisms for sex (IMO, the latter is often a euphemism for screw which is a euphemism for sex). Stuff has mostly lost its sexual connotation in the Sydney dialect at least, but I get the third-hand impression from some Victorians that it is retained there.
this one was only a guess. i did of course mean “arse” — agree with the “ass” examples. which other ones do you disagree with?
in terms of aesthetics all i meant is that people often act under the assumption that genitalia have some intrinsic negative value — whereas they are just collections of cells — i guess “aesthetics” wasn’t the best choice of word
and i must be a true sydney person — i’ve never heard “stuff” in a sexual context!
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