What is the appropriate age to begin using profanity? If I'm out at a restaurant with my "brogrammer" friends, and a mom with kids is at the next table, is swearing inconsiderate, or OK?
What the F? What swearing reveals about language and ourselves
41–49 of 49 posts
Re: What the F? What swearing reveals about language and ourselves
#42Perhaps this is partly why it’s so hard to stop cursing. I curse like a sailor, even though I'm consciously aware that it’s an unhelpful, unprofessional, unarticulated form of communication.
I don't think it is unprofessional on face value. In fact, every 'professional (what does that even mean)' I have known curses. If all you do is curse and never explain an idea, then it is simply a defense mechanism to not knowing what you're talking about. But, cursing is a great to way provide extra emotion to a topic. "The user experience is bad" vs. "The user experience is shit" does add value. But use shit, and…
Neither example is very descriptive and thus not helpful. Using cusswords only puts the other people in an emotional frame of mind, which hinders rational thinking that would otherwise help correct the problem, but I suppose this also depends what exactly the discussion is about. If you're talking about a marketing campaign that is intended to appeal to emotion, then sure, "It sucks" conveys the emotion. If you're talking about packaging logistics, "It sucks" isn't any more helpful than "It's bad". Also, bear in mind that, depending on who you're talking to, some people may secretly harbor less respect from you. People notice when you cuss, esp. if you usually don't. It shapes their perceptions of you.
That said, I do wonder how much tolerance society has for cussing now since many people are starting to accept it as normal. It's as if people are left with the emotional attachment without the actual meaning. How many people here thinking of what "fuck" actually means when they hear the word? Or are you just stuck with the negative connotation?
Re: What the F? What swearing reveals about language and ourselves
#43Speaking of "fuck" I read a paper in the 80s (unfortunstally I've lost it -- it was back when papers were, well, printed on paper) that analyzed why you can say "fan-fucking-tastic: but not "fantas-fucking-tick". I wish I could find it again -- I'd surely understand it better now.
Intuitively, I'd expect it to be because it's much easier to transition from the position of the tongue during the 'n' sound of fantastic to the 'f' sound of fucking than the transition from the 's' in fantastic to the 'f' in fucking. It sort of rolls of the tongue easier.
Re: What the F? What swearing reveals about language and ourselves
#44Matlab had a f##k command. On the prompt, it returned "your place or mine"... Then, in V4, it returned "this command is obsolete". Then it was gone in V5.
Re: What the F? What swearing reveals about language and ourselves
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Three days ago I was scanning Unicode (looking for useful characters for a roguelike, as one does), came across the metrical triseme (⏗), tetraseme (⏘) and pentraseme (⏙) in the Miscellaneous Symbols section, and added them to wikipedia. As far as I could ascertain, these are used to indicate scansion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion#Other_symbols - which is apparently primarily a term used to describe rhythm…
Makes me wonder what would happen if English had a deprecation system like programming. "Prosody @deprecated - to be removed in 2017."
Didn't this happen for spellings in various ortography reforms? I think german had the largest one in recent years and iirc there was a deprecation period for old spellings.
An English spelling reform would be a blessing but almost certainly isn't going to happen. And even if something would work it probably would lead to more fun akin to color-colour.
Re: What the F? What swearing reveals about language and ourselves
#46What is the appropriate age to begin using profanity? If I'm out at a restaurant with my "brogrammer" friends, and a mom with kids is at the next table, is swearing inconsiderate, or OK?
>What is the appropriate age to begin using profanity?
Any age, just don't let your parents hear you. It was a hilarious and harmless way to blow off steam when we were in kidergarten to swear like truckers.
> If I'm out at a restaurant with my "brogrammer" friends, and a mom with kids is at the next table, is swearing inconsiderate, or OK?
It's inconsiderate.
Re: What the F? What swearing reveals about language and ourselves
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's unprofessional, but not unhelpful or unarticulated. A close friend of mine and her mother are both linguists, both professionals (one a speech pathologist, one an editor), both highly articulate and highly educated. They both swear a lot, except in professional settings. They love words, and the speech path in particular loves shakespeare, poetry, and constantly has a book in her hand (these days, more an e-book…
There is a certain art to truly inventive swearing. Farming seems to be an exceptionally fertile ground for salty phrasing, colorfully descriptive word-images, obscene suggestions, and disturbing juxtapositions. I think all of my favorites I learned tinkering on broken-down tractors - although the Quebecois loggers and truck drivers added a certain Catholo-Gallic leavening.
Ask italians and russinans. Their swears are awesome!
Re: What the F? What swearing reveals about language and ourselves
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Expletives are the only infixes in english! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive_infixation
Three days ago I was scanning Unicode (looking for useful characters for a roguelike, as one does), came across the metrical triseme (⏗), tetraseme (⏘) and pentraseme (⏙) in the Miscellaneous Symbols section, and added them to wikipedia. As far as I could ascertain, these are used to indicate scansion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion#Other_symbols - which is apparently primarily a term used to describe rhythm…
Can I ask what library you use for your roguelikes? Last time I was working with ncurses, I found it doesn't support unicode, and wncurses isn't well support on the Mac.
Re: What the F? What swearing reveals about language and ourselves
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Three days ago I was scanning Unicode (looking for useful characters for a roguelike, as one does), came across the metrical triseme (⏗), tetraseme (⏘) and pentraseme (⏙) in the Miscellaneous Symbols section, and added them to wikipedia. As far as I could ascertain, these are used to indicate scansion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion#Other_symbols - which is apparently primarily a term used to describe rhythm…
Can I ask what library you use for your roguelikes? Last time I was working with ncurses, I found it doesn't support unicode, and wncurses isn't well support on the Mac.
I use a few libraries. The roguelike one I use is rotLove[0] for LÖVE[1] for Lua[2], which is a port of rot.js[3], which is itself a libtcod[4] port. However, fonts are handled by LÖVE. I have a bug filed with them right now where Chinese text crashes though, so I wouldn't call it ultra stable. Then again, it's just a fun project to learn Lua, so I'm not in a hurry.
[0] https://github.com/paulofmandown/rotLove [1] http://love2d.org/ [2] http://lua.org [3] http://ondras.github.io/rot.js/ [4] https://bitbucket.org/libtcod/libtcod