On Bad Words

An Investigation into Cussing, Swearing, Cursing, Profanity, Obscenity, Vulgarity, “Bad Words”, and other Potty Language.

A Defense of This Essay

“When I was a kid, I was fascinated by bad words.” -Everyone

I used to be fascinated by bad words. Not so much anymore.

Why are bad words fascinating to children? Part of the fascination of bad words is the transgressive nature of using them. They are forbidden, therefore interesting.

When you get older, they are still transgressive (and hence used by comedians) but transgression is more common and hence less interesting. In one sense, adults do not care whether other adults use bad words. It is true that some have a low opinion of bad words, and a low opinion of their users. But mostly, nobody cares.

So why write an essay about them? Three questions I still find puzzling:

1. What property makes bad words bad?
2. What makes the Big Bad words worse than others?
3. What is the difference between cussing, swearing, vulgarity, obscenity, etc?

I must apologize for even writing this essay. Now, to us moderns an “apology” means admitting wrong and expressing your sorrow. As for the first meaning: I’m sorry.

But classically, an apologia means asserting you are right and defending your position. So here goes: There are two puzzles that have bothered me when I think about bad language. And a puzzle worth formulating is a puzzle worth solving – even if it drags us a bit through the linguistic mud. So I count on you to decide if this question is worth answering.

I want to offer a speculative answer as to the different types of bad word (vulgarities, profanities, etc.). As for what makes bad words bad, I will offer a few thoughts, but really it demands a much richer and more complex study of anthropology, philology, lingustics, culture, and history.

Question 1: What is the difference between cussing and swearing?

There are a range of names we call bad words: what (if anything) is the difference between cussing, swearing, cursing, making an oath, profanity, obscenity, vulgarity, and just plain ol’ bad language? In my youth, these verbs and nouns were used interchangably. Or, perhaps, at the time, I was not sensitive to the subtle distinctions. But even now I hear people use them synonymously, as if saying the S Word is swearing, cussing, and cursing, and profane. What is extension of each concept, and do they overlap? If so, where?

Now I shall offer an analysis of different activities that need to be distinguished.

Swearing

To swear is to make an oath. It is not necessarily to use a dirty word. “By the Beard of Zeus!” says Will Ferrell’s character Ron Burgendy in “Anchorman”, as well as “Spear of Odin!” These are playful oaths. Jesus’ example in the Bible is “By heaven!” and “By earth!” – as in, “By heaven, I will climb that mountain if it’s the last thing I do,” is swearing, but uses no dirty words.

Cursing

To curse is not to swear, nor to use vulgarity, nor obscenity. It may be (always) profane to curse, but the words used need not be profanities. Example: “I hope you die,” or “May your interview be a complete disaster,” is a curse, but includes no bad words. Of the Big Five, two are definitely commonly used in cursing: “damn you!” is a serious curse, but often used playfully. And our culture’s favorite and most deadly serious curse is the relationship-ending “f— you”! Others in the Big Five are only woven into curses by creative license. (“I hope you die you piece of s—”)

Profanity

Profanity is a word or phrase that is irreverent or lacking proper reverence for God or to holy things. In this sense, profanity need not contain bad words: Using “Jesus Christ!” as an exclamation is considered “cussing” in movies, although in a different context the utterance could be a sincere prayer. By the same token, praising God by saying “God is dope” is irreverent and hence profane. However, a sincere prayer laced with explicit language may not be profane, even though ugly and raw.

Cussing

Cussing appeared in the English language around 1771. To cuss is like “to curse” but not necessarily as strong as just cursing. Being a cuss is not necessarily being someone who cusses.

Vulgarity

A vulgarity is synonomous, in my opinion, with “dirty” or “bad” in the aesthetic sense – low, unrefined. The “vulgar” social class as opposed to the refined social class are not morally bad, but enjoy too much salty foods, cheap thrills, simple music, simple stories, and so on. Vulgar language is language of the vulgar class, the dockworker, the construction worker, the truck driver, the garbageman. It is rough, unpoetic, and covers fluidly the range of topics in life that are darker or dirtier. Of the Big Five, s** and p— are vulgar in the more literal sense; they refer to gross bodily substances. All five are vulgar in the cultural sense, that their use tends to signify a speaker of lower class.

Obscenity

Obscene is closer to vulgar but includes the edge of the erotic or “adult.” Howl was judged to be criminally obscene. “Tits” “c—sucker” and “f—” are obscene, but so is “screw” (used as a verb).

Question 2: What makes bad words bad? They are ugly.

First, how many bad words are there? There are lots of bad words: rude synonyms for for feces, for coitus, for flatuation, as well as insults, curses, or racial slurs of all kinds. But I am especially interested in what is typically called “cussing”.

That in mind, a bad word is, at least, a word that is bad. How can a word be bad? Consider badness as a whole. There are, in general, at least four distinct kinds of badness:

1. Moral badness, which applies only to people (it’s not really a bad “bad dog”.);
2. Instrumental badness, which applies to anything with a function – a bad clock doesn’t tell the correct time except twice a day. A bad car doesn’t run, or isn’t comfortable to drive in while it does. If the dog is supposed to guard the house, and he merely whines at strangers, then he is indeed a bad dog in this sense. A soldier who is a coward is bad in an instrumental (not just a moral!) sense – since he is useless.
3. Aesthetic badness: ugliness. Even something, like a vase or painting, something without a moral character, and without a particular function (at least not one that is as cut and dry as the function of knives, guarddogs, and soldiers) could be a bad painting. (I think bad smells fall into this category? What smells so bad? Oh, the trash has a rotten banana in it).
4. Epistemic badness, which applies to that which is mistaken or false, like a bad answer to the question “what is 3x3?” or a bad call by a football referee.

So what kind of bad are bad words? The most plausible guess is that bad words are morally bad and aesthetically bad.

Take moral badness first. When someone regularly uses foul language, we might be inclined to judge their character as defective on that basis alone. For instance, I read once in a spiritual text that one of the “daughters” of lust is “dirty jokes.” In other words, making excessive sexual jokes arise from the same defect of character as the actual commission of illicit sexual acts. (Not, of course, that they are morally identical or even comparable – rather, they are psychologically related.) You may not agree with this diagnosis, but the point is that we do tend to judge ourselves and others by what we say, regardless of whether or not we underscore that defect by action. We might judge a potty-mouth teenager to be a certain sort of teenager (rebellious, dishonorable, dishonest) merely on the basis of his choice of dress, haircut, and language. We may be wrong in such a snap judgment, but all I need for my argument at this point is for you to concede that we make it. When we see somone who does not seem capable of constructing a sentence that lacks either the F or the S word we judge to be a bad person in some sense, without ever having witnessed him disrespect his parents or cheat on an exam or steal booze.

But on this account, are the words bad words? Or is the speaker bad by using them? The two (the speaker and the speech) are certainly related. So there are three possible answers: 1) the words themselves are bad and thus have a causal role in making the speaker bad, in “dragging him down.” 2) the words are neither bad nor good, but the speaker only uses them because he is bad. 3) The words are bad, but the speaker is not bad – he is just using a bad word.

The other plausible answer is that bad words are “aesthetically bad.” They are “foul” like a “foul stench” or a “foul ball.” They are “out of bounds” – inappropriate, repugnant, obnoxious. They are a fly in the ointment, a discordant note in the otherwise lovely melody. On this account, the words are bad in context of the sentence, the speech or conversation, the interlocuters, the setting, time, and place that the words are uttered. A word like “skeleton” can be a “bad word” if it is ill-used at a polite dinner party. A medical (and not slang) word like “diarhea” can be a “bad word” in the context of a graduation speech.

The best guess I can offer to make sense of this is that bad words are first and foremost bad aesthetically. Bad words, cuss words, are ugly words. They are useful for ugly purposes (like exclaiming, cursing, or shocking) but they cannot gracefully adorn gentle and noble purposes. Secondly, bad words can be bad morally and reflect the badness of the speaker. The relation between aesthetic ugliness and moral badness is a complex one. A dingy, disgusting drug dealer’s den is both dirty and despicable… but some beautiful things are wicked (billboards) and some ugly things are noble (wrinkly old women).

Question 3: What makes the Big Bad words worse than others? No idea.

This still puzzles me, and I don’t have an answer.

Why is “crap” a marginally bad word, absolutely forbidden in some conservative households but freely bartered in others as an acceptable alternative to “the S Word”? Why is “shoot!” not as bad as “crap” even though it much closer pheonetically (one measely vowel sound away) to the S Word?

It’s not just that the referent of the word is worse. For “genocide” is a much worse referent than S, and referring to “rape” or “skeleton” is impolite but not as impolite as F.

But we are not talking about all bad words. We are talking about “cussing.” Those are, first and foremost, the Big Five.

The Big Five “cuss words” that are censored on television are, of course, A–, D—, S—, B—-, and F—. (George Carlin’s list includes three more to boot). More broadly, cussing includes a host of other potty words that are just slang for body parts, like “d—” and “c—”.

What’s the worst word? A Christmas Story calls the F word the “big one, the queen mother of dirty words.” But, as far as I can tell, the C word is worse right now than even the F word.

More broadly still, there are a host of combined words: God—-, dumba–, motherf—-, s—faced, piece of s—, b—-slap, and so on. (Of course, Shakespeare could do much worse with much prettier words: “I could but wish we were better strangers.”)

If my hypothesis that bad words are bad aesthetically is correct, then we ought to expect some patterns within a language as to what words are bad, and even patterns across languages (hard gutteral aspirative “k” sounds, or hard palettal plosive “d” sounds). If so, is it phenetics? Is “plucks” uglier than “removes”?

I don’t understand how a word makes it on to, or gets removed from, the Big Five List.

Conclusion

My three questions were: how do we categorize bad words? And what makes bad words bad? and what makes some bad words worse than others?

My answers have been that we distinguish six ways we use bad words, corresponding to their various titles (swearing versus uttering obscenities).

And that bad words (and their use) are bad aesthetically: they are ugly. (They or their use can only be called bad morally after a difficult analysis of the relation between ugliness and immorality, which I have not attempted here.)

None of this solves the really interesting philological first question about how bad words arise and acquire their badness. But I hope it helps the curious among us know when, why, and exactly how to use – or not use – bad words.

Appendix: My background

Those who will take up with interest an essay on bad words may not demand that I admit wrongdoing. Those who take it up with disgust (but continue reading for some reason) may ignore any philosophical justification and speculate as to my psychological motives. (They might posit, for instance, that the present writer suffers from a juvenile sense of humor. And they would be right.)

But they might also posit a debased and desensitised imagination that does not even see the impropriety of discussing, with a pseudo-scientific detachment, potty language. They would be wrong.

In order to forestall such armchair psychoanalysis, I will psychoanalyze myself to a minimal extent. I grew up in a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant household in which my father never “cussed”. Once I heard my dad utter the word “damn” while under great stress, and the moment was so rare and intense it burned into my memory. I thought perhaps the world was ending.

My mom did not bide rude words like “that sucks” or “shut up” or even “oh my God.” (Eventually “crap” was permitted by the sheer force of our using it, though she would frown with disapproval.)

In our house, words for body parts were politely medical: boys had penises, women had breasts and vaginas. My dad included the occasionally risque joke (which he called “earthy”) within his endless stream of jokes, but they were always drowned out by other cleaner jokes. We never watched the dirtiest of movies, told the dirtiest of jokes, or used foul language freely. My six siblings and I were mostly schooled at home. This limited the inevitable exposure to dirty words and concepts that results from prolonged exposure to one’s peers. My brothers, more than my schoolmates, taught me what “bad words” I knew. And the “bad words” on our sacred list of bad words was short. (Perhaps “profane list”.) With that said, I hope my little discussion can attain some scientific objectivity and achieve some scientific results.