Good link, makeme. Lots of answers for seed to ponder.
Strangely enough, the current issue of Mental_Floss addresses just this issue. Since it can't be found online I'll attempt to type it in (spelling errors mine)
"Our parents are totally going to ground us for talking about his, but if you must know, a "curse" was originally just a bad type of prayer. Tus, the first curse word was likely "damn" as in asking God to damn someone to Hell, which was considered taboo because of the religious power it wielded. Condemnimg people to an enternity of suffering isn't something to let everyone just go around doing on a daily basis, so the government stepped in, leading to the first censorship laws. Amon the first victims was William Shakespeare, whose works were considered quite racy for their time, and not just because he sent his fair share of characters to Hades. The Bard's plays were littered with sexual innuendo, and eventually, these types of references become swear words as well. Depending on what the sexual mores of the current generation were, formerly innocuous words could suddenly become unfit for polite company. The Victorians, for instance, instituted the practice of referring to the thigh mean of a chicken as "dark meat" because sying the word "leg" or "thigh" at dinner could be enough to give your hostess a case of the vapors. And in the 17th century, the "c-word" that formerly referred to a certain barnyard fowl took on another, er, more inappropriate meaning, leading to the invention of words like "rooster" and "weathervane" to keep the newly dirty word from crossing genteel lips. Sometimes these avoidance tactics went a little too far, though. Case in point: the 1952-53 season of "I Love Lucy" during which, despite the star's stomach being about the size of the Superdome, censors prevented the show's writers from even once mentioning the word "pregnant".
Merry Andrew wrote:Thirdly, it's a cultural thing. There's a Biblical injunction against taking "the Lord's name in vain." Thus religious folk find it offensive to hear exclamations e.g. 'Goddamn!' or 'Jesus Christ!'
i had a great conversation with a christian coworker one day about what language on the radio was offensive to her, and she said it made her laugh that in the alanis morrisette song 'one hand in my pocket', they had to edit the word chicken sh*t, so that it sounded like ckickenish, but in the harvey danger song "flagpole sitta", they used the word goddamn, some thing she found more offensive
boomer I have that issue... i love mental_floss
mental_floss is a fun magazine!
I loved the swimsuit issue last summer.
i just got mental_floss condensed knowlegde... its great
Now say a woman was wearing a particularily colourful dress, you are admiring it, and you happen to be a Primatoligist. You say to her with a complimentary smile "Nice dress, it looks like a baboon's rectum." I mean, how could that ever be taken out of context?
But 'rectum' is not a cussword.
It reminds me of the story of the kids in school who were asked by their teacher to describe a sad insident in their lives. And little ehBeth got to her little feet and said, "Well, when I was weal widdle, I had a puppy that got run over by a car and I cried for days." Little Montana got up and said: "When I was li'l, I saw a dead bird, frozen to death in the cold Canajun winter and that made me real sad." And when it came to little Cavfan, he said: "I had an older brother with the 'Murrican forces in the first Guf War and he got shot right up the arse. That made me sad."
The teacher was outraged. She said: "You can't use words like that, Cav. Say 'rectum'." And Cav said: "'Rectum'? F**k, it killed 'im."
