Fascinating article.<p>In particular, I find the final point incredibly interesting: black men use the N-word to mean "buddy" and that black culture is becoming much more mainstream. As such others would like to use the vocabulary of black culture without being black.<p>One would imagine that the increased use of the vocab of black culture would lead to decreased racism. But, if it cannot be used because of the current stigma of non-blacks using the N-word, perhaps this stigma actually increases racism instead of decreasing it.
For more on this topic, I recommend Steven Pinker's 2007 talk at Google. In the second part of it, Pinker tries to answer the question, "Why do people get so upset over certain words?"[1] He falsifies some popular hypotheses and finds interesting commonalities across languages. Obviously, the video contains lots of swearing.<p>1. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBpetDxIEMU&t=1233" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBpetDxIEMU&t=1233</a>
Just a reminder about history, Richard Pryor, whose comedy albums include 'That Nigger's Crazy' (1974), and "Bicentennial Nigger" (1976) then, and I quote now from his Wikipedia entry:<p>> In 1979, at the height of his success, Pryor visited Africa. Upon returning to the United States, Pryor swore he would never use the word "nigger" in his stand-up comedy routine again.[36] However, his favorite epithet, "motherfucker", remains a term of endearment on his official website.<p>There's a lovely composite of Pryor's views vs. Carlin's at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZCS5I80X-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZCS5I80X-8</a> , which is the [36] above. I empathize much more with Pryor in that sequence than Carlin.
<i>'But do note that I have to euphemize the N-word here in print just as someone would have once have felt compelled to say, “By Jove!”'</i><p>But why? They're just words - a set of phonemes as @jasode points out. The meaning is only inferred from the context in which the word is used - this is made clear from the last few paragraphs about the use of the word nigger to mean buddy.<p>My first (unconscious) response on reading 'N-word' or similar is to translate that euphemism to the word itself, so nothing is spared in the mind of the reader by "censoring".<p>Instead it seems the author is trying to expunge himself of having used profanity, when in fact discussing a word in this context is surely not profane?
Instead of a history of evolving swear words (which implies a changing society), it's much more interesting to me that there's possibly a neurological or cognitive basis for swear words (which implies a stable source that's built into our DNA.)<p>When I was a kid and filtered the world as facts in black & white, it was baffling why certain words were "bad". Why is c_nt so bad? <i>That doesn't make sense -- It's just a word!</i> If you were to let a foreigner who didn't understand English listen to 100 random words with c_nt being one of them, he/she would not be able to identify <i>which</i> word was the nasty one. Listening to the phoneme is not enough. With that mindset, I laughed along with the George Carlin "7 Dirty Words" routine[1].<p>Later in life, I ran across across a thread discussing profanity and I saw an interesting sentence that finally made it click. Basically it said, "if <i>c_nt</i> wasn't the taboo word, it would be <i>another word</i> that was equally taboo."<p>In other words, we seem to always create this "space" in language reserved for taboo. It's not related to specific phonemes. If one says that humans have built in brain wiring for "grammar" (Chomsky[2]) to understand nouns, verbs, and recursive clauses... one might extend that to say we also have innate brain wiring to <i>always</i> create taboo swear words. It is unavoidable.<p>For example, the creator of Esperanto didn't put any cuss words in his language because he thought it was unnecessary. (It was a language designed to foster harmony so that's understandable.) Nevertheless, Esperanto evolved to eventually have swear words.<p>I notice that manufactured languages such as Klingon also has swear words/phrases. However, I'm not a trekkie so I don't know if they elicit any negative emotions or they are there simply as an exercise in "universe building".<p>[1]<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbZhpf3sQxQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbZhpf3sQxQ</a><p>[2]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar</a>
Lenny Bruce covered this topic back in in his day*, and wasn't afraid to use the actual words instead of euphemisms like in this article. The people trying to censor 'profanity' are the ones who give the words power.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfNhiRGQ-js" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfNhiRGQ-js</a>
Reinhold Aman did incredibly deep research on verbal aggression through the 1980s and 1990s and was a bit infamous for his radio interviews. Check out the Maledicta website and journal:<p><a href="http://aman.members.sonic.net/" rel="nofollow">http://aman.members.sonic.net/</a>
Thousands of years ago humans must have discovered that profanity is the universal lubricant -you've got WD40 and you keep your best hammer at hand, but at the very end you know that it will not do without some cursing...
I love the fact that in the picture, the robot's profanity is MXLPLX. Presumably a reference to Mister Mxyzptlk[0]?<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Mxyzptlk" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Mxyzptlk</a>
In the year 2015(35 years ago now) anthropologists are still trying to work out why there was such a reduction in profanity. The great indecency purge of 2020 had lead to the systematic removal of any site deemed "backward", "profane", "explicit" or "not politically correct". This was before people willingly checked their privelege. People used the internet, not as a tool of information as we do today, but to debate different points of view and exchange insults on the internet.<p>As we know, tumblr lead the crusade against these heathens who subjugated minorities and women with their jokes about things like the r-word. As we know this spilled out IRL and lead to a 3000% increase in sexual assualt and violence which was underhandedly covered up by the patriarchy.<p>With the age of goodthink, we are free from such horrid viewpoints and equality has been spread to accross the globe. Silicon Valley was relocated to Arkansas to rebalance housing prices in the region. Hiring procedures were moved to blanced and equal demographic system, finally, people were judged not as engineers but as numbers filling a quota.<p>Everything has become ++good, and we may never know why or how profanity was eradicated, but it has lead to the stable society we know and love.<p>Alex Alexis<p>tumblrbuzzfeed9gagblogger media<p>non-binary, pan-sexual, pronouns: xe/xem/xyr/xemself/co/cos/cos/coself