Comments on: What Our Swear Words Say About Us (Part 1)

By: michael

michael — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 10:53:21 +0000

Vaginas are hated by “the gays”? Interesting.

Whilst you are rightly pissed off that people use cunt as a derogatory term you did something very similar by using gays in a derogatory context.

By: rachel

rachel — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:59:33 +0000

What does using the word cunt imply about men? That they are gays thats what. Why would a straight man hate vaginas so much that he uses them as an insult?

When men say that I get pissed off simply because it implies vaginas (including my own!) are horrible repulsive nasty things, which quite frankly as a woman, I find very offensive.

… And after all men’s bits are hardly a work of art..funny looking dangly bits and pieces hanging between their legs..and yet it’s us women’s relatively inconspicous “cunts” that get considered the worst swearword. Its just stupid. >:-|

By: michael

michael — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:33:05 +0000

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!

By: Joel

Joel — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:20:01 +0000

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.

By: michael

michael — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:00:57 +0000

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

By: Alan

Alan — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:49:40 +0000

By the way, I think you’ve got a bit of unintended transposition going on in your post title.

By: Alan

Alan — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:49:10 +0000

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.