@centrox,
-- continued digression alert --
centrox wrote:Maybe it was where I grew up, (London) or the social milieu (distinctly middle class) but in, let us say, 1965, if one of my pals had called a girl or woman, however much he was angry with her, a "****", it would have seemed slightly inappropriate (linguistically, I mean, not morally or politically). A **** was a guy. Guys who called women cunts were in the pages of Last Exit to Brooklyn, sure, and we knew of the usage, but it just wasn't very common. The **** = hated man meaning was the dominant one. That was then. Now, of course, lots of people call women cunts.
That all makes lots of sense. Both in terms of the background you describe -- cause I'm guessing it was quite different for a working class guy in Glasgow, then already too -- and in the nuances of how the usage did change or increase over time.
I dunno. I mean, I definitely didn't want to start out making assumptions about your background, and I vaguely remember Izzy sharing something about his that definitely didn't involve having a sheltered or privileged life. I do feel like some people here must have lived fairly sheltered lives though, when I see the amount of offense caused by crude or coarse language. Everyone’s entitled to do all the tut-tutting they feel moved to, of course. And more politically substantiated arguments about the shadow sides of distinct vocabularies, especially as they concern race, gender, etc -- as you already started making -- can of course be perfectly legitimate and valuable.
But I dunno. I’d just disadvise y’all to try learning, say, Dutch or Hungarian, because some of you’d have conniptions if you heard the kind of things people say in the street. Many Dutch will mutter "****!" when they stub their toe or sigh "what **** weather" at the rain (not to mention their habit of using horrible diseases as casual curses); and in Hungary I heard people every day being impressed or exasperated enough at something (not specifically women) to exclaim "this whore!". (And that was the least of it.)
Considering we're digressing into the politics of language here, I will definitely admit to a certain defensiveness about the policing of language where I feel it erases the voices and vocabularies of... well, let’s say, for lack of more precise or nuanced categorizations, working class people. Not that every working class lad goes about spouting obscenities all the time, of course! Lot of working class families will deeply frown on them as well; my granny certainly would have (though my great aunt maybe not so much...). Neither that you won't catch a middle class person in one, of course.
But there
is a very long history of cultural policing, going back a couple of centuries, in which upper and middle class people tried to restrain, suppress, punish and cleanse out the rawer and rowdier dimensions of working class culture, including its richly objectionable vocabularies of cursing and swearing, using all the institutional power they wielded in top-down and sometimes violent “civilization offensives”. It’s not a proud history, in my opinion.
That doesn't mean everyone should just accept any old racist, sexist, or violent speech. I feel that forums like this should clean out the hate speech, and ideally their users would rebuke, ridicule or ignore any of the other racist/sexist/etc stuff that doesn't meet that bar. But even if I totally accept that an argument about the word "****" could be made in either direction and the borderline is necessarily fuzzy, I do feel there is more generally speaking a difference between racist/sexist/etc and hate speech on the one hand, and stuff that just makes some people tut-tut in offense because it's crude, rude and vulgar on the other.
Anyway, I did it again - derailed the thread (or helped the derail along, at least) with some lengthy digression about something entirely unrelated. Apologies.
