It is very unfortunate to see how casually bad words are spouted publicly these days.
This response to an answer on Quora made me viscerally angry. Is this an “I know them when I see them” sort of filter, or does this man have a list of all the “bad” words? In any case, how dare he levy such a judgment against any element of speech between sapient beings! The sanctity of free communication must be inviolable.
What could he mean? Rather than launch an attack beneath the blanket of a hundred other forgotten comments, I decided to break down what these allegedly “bad” words could be and came up with a few categories of words that might be considered … well, that should be used judiciously.
Slang is a bucket of junk words. When hungry for expression, we could invest time and energy to cook a feast of colorful and evocative verbiage, or we could reach for the slang bucket. It’s not wrong to grab a handy snack occasionally, and sometimes their peculiar flavor lends pleasant spice to conversation, but those making a habit of their consumption will find themselves fat and lazy.
Swearing in its modern sense is a more potent subset of slang. The first must have been blasphemous, followed by references to acts deemed evil by the targets of blasphemy. They weren’t evil in and of themselves, as if the configuration of their letters invoked some dark magic, but they threatened the validity and power of the people and ideas that were thought to hold together a society.
Insults are direct derogatory references to some human characteristic such as ethnicity, sexual orientation, intelligence, or attractiveness. These can be the payload of exclamatory epithets targeted directly at an individual, or they may inhabit the stage of dubiously humorous speech. Contrary to swearing, these words tend to target an unempowered class of people. They steal from the poor to give to the rich. Impugning the dignity of others makes us feel better in comparison.
None of these words are “bad”. Their mere invocation does no harm. When directed toward an individual, insults can be hurtful, but is the act of typing “nigger” or “cunt” to be considered downright evil? There is no vocabulary of epithets against the white male, so I’m left to imagine what a black person or female might feel when encountering the words. There must be a sense of diminishment involved, or an affront at the thought of attempted diminishment.
But, back to me– am I “bad” by proxy just for thinking them?
Before I started cursing, I saw these words carved into my drafting table in high school: “shit fuck fuck you”. I couldn’t stop repeating the string. First in my head, then aloud as I walked home alone. There was some dirty poetry in the cadence of the swearing. I loved it. It was a nonsense phrase that hurt nobody, but I derived no small pleasure from the dulcet iniquity of its repetition.
That innocent anecdote aside, there have been times in traffic I’ve uttered “nigger” in my head to a slothful pedestrian of African descent, but certainly less often than “fat-ass son of a bitch”, and practically fading into silence when compared to the cacophonous symphony of “cunt” heard during my divorce. In the fevered moments of an invective harangue, we use words appropriate to the person and attributes of our target. We aren’t (necessarily) meaning to belittle an entire race or gender or way of life, but we’re wielding words as weapons used when one is in verbal combat with those aggregate entities.
Like fire against trolls or water over witches, the usage is meant only to vanquish the one under the bridge or on the broomstick, not to launch a holocaustic assault against all and the gentler of their kind.