{"id":638,"date":"2015-04-07T08:51:19","date_gmt":"2015-04-07T12:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/?p=638"},"modified":"2026-04-07T09:04:24","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T13:04:24","slug":"bad-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/07\/bad-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is very unfortunate to see how casually bad words are spouted publicly these days.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This response to an answer on Quora made me viscerally angry<\/em>. \u00a0Is this an “I know them when I see them” sort of filter, or does this man have a list of all the “bad” words? \u00a0 In any case, how dare he levy such a judgment against\u00a0any element of speech between sapient beings! \u00a0The sanctity of free communication must be inviolable.<\/p>\n

What could he mean? \u00a0Rather 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\u00a0categories of words that might be considered … well,\u00a0that should be used judiciously<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Slang<\/strong> is a bucket of junk words. \u00a0When hungry for expression, we could invest\u00a0time and energy to cook a feast of colorful and evocative verbiage, or we could reach for the slang bucket. \u00a0It’s not wrong to grab a handy snack occasionally, and sometimes their peculiar\u00a0flavor\u00a0lends pleasant\u00a0spice\u00a0to conversation, but those making a\u00a0habit of their consumption will find themselves\u00a0fat and lazy.<\/p>\n

Swearing<\/strong> in its\u00a0modern sense is a more potent\u00a0subset of slang. \u00a0The first must have been blasphemous, followed by references to acts deemed evil by the targets of blasphemy. \u00a0They 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 \u00a0the people and ideas that were thought to hold together a\u00a0society.<\/p>\n

Insults<\/strong>\u00a0are direct derogatory references to some human characteristic such as ethnicity,\u00a0sexual orientation, intelligence, \u00a0or\u00a0attractiveness. \u00a0These can be the payload of exclamatory epithets targeted directly at an individual, or they may\u00a0inhabit the stage of\u00a0dubiously\u00a0humorous speech. \u00a0Contrary\u00a0to swearing, these words tend to target an unempowered<\/em> class of people. \u00a0They steal from the poor to give to the rich. \u00a0Impugning the dignity of others makes us feel better in\u00a0comparison.<\/p>\n

None of these words are “bad”. \u00a0Their mere invocation does no harm. \u00a0When directed toward an individual, insults can be hurtful, but is the act of\u00a0typing<\/em> “nigger” or “cunt” to be considered downright evil<\/em>? \u00a0There is no\u00a0vocabulary of epithets against the white male, so I’m left to imagine what\u00a0a black person or female might\u00a0feel when encountering\u00a0the words. \u00a0There must be a sense of diminishment involved, or an affront at the thought of attempted diminishment.<\/p>\n

But, back to me– am I “bad” by proxy just for thinking<\/em> them?<\/p>\n

Before I started cursing, I saw these words carved into\u00a0my drafting table\u00a0in high school: “shit fuck fuck you”. \u00a0I couldn’t stop repeating the string. \u00a0First in my head, then aloud as I walked home alone. \u00a0There was some dirty poetry in the cadence of the swearing. \u00a0I loved it. \u00a0It was a nonsense phrase that hurt nobody, but I derived\u00a0no small pleasure from\u00a0the dulcet\u00a0iniquity of\u00a0its repetition.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0In the fevered moments of an\u00a0invective harangue, we use\u00a0words\u00a0appropriate to the person and attributes of our\u00a0target. \u00a0We 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.<\/p>\n

Like fire against trolls or water over witches, the usage is meant\u00a0only to vanquish the one under the bridge or on the broomstick, not to launch\u00a0a holocaustic assault\u00a0against all and the gentler of their kind.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. \u00a0Is this an “I know them when I see them” sort of filter, or does this man have a list of all the “bad” words? \u00a0 In any case, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[91,90,89],"class_list":["post-638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-language","tag-race","tag-raw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=638"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":642,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions\/642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}