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Profanity Doesn't Work

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Re: Profanity Doesn't Work

#11

Post by Tsagadai »

I disagree with the article. Swearing is highly effective but only if rarely used. The article's author hints at innuendo, euphemisms, dysphemisms and doublespeak as alternatives to swearing. I am a firm believer and follower of concise eloquence so avoiding calling a spade a spade is akin to heresy. Come out and say it, don't avoid words when they perfectly describe something.

Think of swearing as an alternative to hitting someone. Sometimes you really want to hit someone and there may be a good reason for it but violence is never appropriate. Swearing in such a contexts is how humans don't continuously tear each other apart. They should be a tool of last resort to express our most powerful emotions.

Expletives are the most powerful words in every language, but they only retain their power when used infrequently and in contexts that demand them.

Re: Profanity Doesn't Work

#13

Post by baddox »

The linked article "The Nine Parts of Speech and the F-word" is silly. Replacing "John went to the bakery" with "That f* went to the bakery" does not a pronoun make, any more than "That person went to the bakery" makes "person" a pronoun. The reflexive pronoun examples are similarly weak. The third line under "Adverbs" has at least one error that makes it nonsensical. I stopped reading at that point, but I'm sure there is plenty more garbage in that article.

Re: Profanity Doesn't Work

#14

Post by buff-a »

However, you take no chances of offending by not swearing, but you guarantee to offend someone if you do.

Good. Fuck them. Believe me, we aren't going to get along. Best to know now. Also, I believe in evolution, think the earth is more than 4000 years old and I support gay marriage. That offends a ton of people and expressing that opinion has the same effect on those "relationships" as saying "fuck".

You might think you're being polite. You're not. As Bill Hicks would say, you're sucking on Satan's cock, ice ice baby.

And as a matter of economic reality, I've found that the better educated, and economically advantaged a person is, the more likely they are to use words that others have judged to be offensive. "Manners" are what the servants have.

Then there's an anecdotal inverse correlation between the likelihood that a person uses the word "fuck" and the likelihood that they support dropping cluster-bombs on civilian areas. That is people go all weak at the knees if I say "fuck", but those same people are all for shredding small children: just so long as they are "non-christians". (Yeah, I'm sure you don't do that Mr No-Potty-Words HN reader - its just a general observation).

Whatever.

Re: Profanity Doesn't Work

#15

Post by Aqua_Geek »

malbs wrote: post #6

I'm not sure what industry Scott actually works in? I can look at our code-base here at work, and there are plenty of swear words through out. The classic foobar as an extension on fubar, as in fucked up beyond all recognition. Then there was that article a few years ago (which I can't even remember the actual argument, but I think it was about censorship) that the linux kernel source code would be black listed becau…

> Swearing almost goes with the territory of being a programmer.

I respectfully disagree.

As a counterexample to your codebase, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single swear word in the 50k lines of one of my projects - even in the commit messages.

Re: Profanity Doesn't Work

#16

Post by MostAwesomeDude »

epochwolf wrote: post #4
bradleybuda wrote: post #2

Fuck that.

Could you elaborate?

Sometimes shit sucks.

Or, to be more verbose, sometimes somebody creates, publishes, and endorses a crafted good or work which is incredibly inferior not just to current state of the art, but also prior art and future ideals, but without any indication that the creator has encountered any reason to believe that their invention will not stand the tests of time, merchantability, reliability, insight into the human condition, etc.

In those cases, it's incredibly useful to identify and call out these things as bad. If we can't use the full width and breadth of language, then it gets harder to do so; invariably, all attempts at censorship start with the negative parts of language in an attempt to whitewash thought and opinion. (As recent examples, consider Facebook's omission of a "Dislike" button, or American Idol's refusal to allow voters to indicate unfavorable opinions of all contestants. The historical ideal is Newspeak.) When we can't say that something is bad, then we lose some of our freedom, not to mention some of the expressiveness required to attack everyday problems.

So, yeah, fuck that. Sometimes shit sucks.

Re: Profanity Doesn't Work

#17

Post by sams99 »

Dove wrote: post #8
kstenerud wrote: post #3

What always amuses me is the tendency of some people to "censor" out profanity (f * vs fuck and s * vs shit), as if by not actually typing the word, the writer could write about profanity and yet not be "sullied" by it, or something to that effect. Seriously, loosen up. This almost puritanical aversion to profanity is unhealthy.

Actually, there is an effect on the reader. Being indirect softens the blow for folks who are offended by it, much like a euphemism does.

People are always offended for "other" people, I would be curious to hear the thoughts of a person who is truly offended by the word fuck. Does it have some magic powers that cause it to fire off a pain circuit in mutant brains?

Re: Profanity Doesn't Work

#18

Post by jarin »

I did 5 years in the Navy, so I have to try really hard NOT to swear occasionally. I generally don't have a problem around children or my great grandma, but when I'm giving a talk it's pretty hard not to.

I don't put swear words in my slides, though.

Re: Profanity Doesn't Work

#19

Post by feralchimp »

buff-a wrote: post #14

However, you take no chances of offending by not swearing, but you guarantee to offend someone if you do. Good. Fuck them. Believe me, we aren't going to get along. Best to know now. Also, I believe in evolution, think the earth is more than 4000 years old and I support gay marriage. That offends a ton of people and expressing that opinion has the same effect on those "relationships" as saying "fuck". You might think…

If you're writing people off as "too far outside your value system to be worth bothering with" because they happen to find swearing offensive, you're missing out on knowing a lot of really awesome people for a pretty stupid reason. Then again, your policy does save them hassle, so maybe it's for the best. Penalties offset...repeat first down.
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