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I wonder if God is fooled when she hears this code?
I doubt it.
1 Samuel 16:7
But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart."
I had an interesting exchange with my retired-english-teacher aunt one time. I had said "Bull!" to someone's story. She told me to never say that in her presence because it was just short for "BS". She said that when I said "Bull", I was really thinking "BS" - everyone who heard it was thinking ,"BS" - and that all I had done was skirt the letter of the law by not saying it out loud.
I agree with her on most accounts - fudge, fetch, shoot, dang, darn, gosh, etc. - are directly derived and diluted from prevalent profanities, and annoy the heck out of me (oh, and add "heck" to the list).
But a few years later, I read about the old term "Irish Bull", used to mean a tall, unbelievable claim. The story said that "Irish Bull" was shortened to "Bull", then later elongated to "Bullshit" to add strength to the term. I never did summon up the courage to take that story back to my aunt and say, "Look - here's why I can say 'Bull'."
Obligatory quote: "Ooohhh fffuuudddgggeee....only I didn't say fudge."
Telemath, so your English teacher claims that we can't have it both ways i.e., we can't have the impact and satisfaction of saying swear words and at the same time escape responsibility for saying them. What a party pooper. I wonder if "A Way With Words" has ever asked its listeners to identify unusual substitutes for swear words? I like the sound of Ron Delaney's "muffin-lugin". A Mormon friend of mine used to say"scrud" which I never knew what it was a substitute for if anything.
My English teacher used to say that a person who used profanity didn't have the a large enough vocabulary to adequately express themselves with acceptable words. I would be interested in what others think about that assumption.
Garry Shirts said:
Telemath, so your English teacher claims that we can't have it both ways i.e., we can't have the impact and satisfaction of saying swear words and at the same time escape responsibility for saying them. What a party pooper. I wonder if "A Way With Words" has ever asked its listeners to identify unusual substitutes for swear words? I like the sound of Ron Delaney's "muffin-lugin". A Mormon friend of mine used to say"scrud" which I never knew what it was a substitute for if anything.
Then there's the all-purpose "frak" from the Babylon 5 universe.
Also in science fiction, I remember a bit in one of Asimov's stories where a prudish character blurts out "what the Dickens?" and is chastised by someone more earthy who sarcastically points out that "Dickens is just a euphemism for devil, you know".
My English teacher used to say that a person who used profanity didn't have the a large enough vocabulary to adequately express themselves with acceptable words. I would be interested in what others think about that assumption.
I prefer to have the swear words available. I don't go throwing them around at every occasion, which means that when I do use them they should have a much greater impact.
I make a distinction between vulgarity and profanity. I classify those words that men and women are offended by as vulgarity The way I see it, it is only the vulgarity scale that separates shit, fuck, dick from excrement / manure, intercourse, penis. I classify those words that God is offended by as profanity (e.g. damn, Jesus Christ as an epithet, OMG). I strive to avoid the latter, but feel fairly indifferent about the former.
Besides, a good string of vulgarities can serve a therapeutic purpose:
… psychologists at Britain's Keele University recruited 64 college students and asked them to stick their hands in a bucket of ice water and endure the pain for several minutes. One group was allowed to repeat a curse word of their choice continuously while their hands were in the water; another group was asked to repeat a non-expletive control word, such as that which might be used to describe a table.
I wonder if God is fooled when she hears this code?
EmmettRedd's reply was correct as far as it goes, but remember it goes both ways. If you're delight in making people uncomfortable by words that sound like something offensive, and then back away acting all innocent saying "What? I didn't say anything!", then yes, God is not fooled. On the other hand, if you grew up thinking "geez!" is a harmless epithet and you use it without meaning anything blasphemous by it, God's not fooled by that either; He knows what you really meant.
My English teacher used to say that a person who used profanity didn't have the a large enough vocabulary to adequately express themselves with acceptable words.
When I first became aware of words like "gee", "darn" etc—aware, I mean, that they started out as euphemistic almost-swear words—I tried expunging them from my repertoire. Then I started wondering why I bothered with expletives and ejaculations at all: What do "wow!", "cool!" and such add to the description? Eventually I decided I was wrong; I can't prove it, but I think they're part of being human, or anyway my language seemed bland and dry without them. Could be I didn't stick to it long enough to discover how to do it better, but anyway that's what I think now.
So does that mean I ended up agreeing with the notion that language is offensive only around people who are offended by it? Well, yes, almost. I never changed my mind about Glenn's distinction—I never use "God!" or "Jesus Christ!" as ejaculations, and I keep "hell" and "damned" on a very short leash—but I've decided some of the scatological words really do depend on who's around to hear them.
But there are one or two words that offend me, and (surprisingly) one or two terms that I've encountered that seem to offend God, too, at least in my mouth. So I never use them at all.
There are some colorful ones I know from Black English, and they show up in songs sometimes as thinly veiled cursing. I think my favorite is "bad motor scooter." I once heard this in a sermon as in "Ahab was one baaad motor scooter."
Another great one is the song lyric "she's a brick (pause) house."
I don't care one way or the other about cursing, but I actually like the kind of word play that results from just-barely-cleaned-up language.
Such word play is not restricted to English. Some stereotypical French substitutions may even be familiar to English speakers, as they are commonly sprinkled into the dialog for French characters. Sacré Bleu (lit. trans. "holy blue", trans. "Gosh") and Zut (as in Zut, alors. A nonsense syllable, trans. "darn it") are sound-alikes for Sacré Dieu (trans. "holy God") and Pute (a shortened form of putain, trans. "whore", used in similar contexts as epithetical "damn").
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