Concept
Profanity
Overview
Profanity, also known as swearing, cursing, or cussing, is the usage of notionally offensive words for a variety of purposes, including to demonstrate disrespect or negativity, to relieve pain, to express a strong emotion (such as anger, excitement, or surprise), as a grammatical intensifier or emphasis, or to express informality or conversational intimacy. In many formal or polite social situations, it is considered impolite (a violation of social norms), and in some religious groups it is considered a sin. Profanity includes slurs, but most profanities are not slurs, and there are many insults that do not use swear words.
Swear words can be discussed or even sometimes used for the same purpose without causing offense or being considered impolite if they are obscured (e.g. "fuck" becomes "f***" or "the f-word") or substituted with a minced oath like "flip".
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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The circle of sacred objects cannot be determined, then, once for all. Its extent varies infinitely, according to the different religions. That is how Buddhism is a religion: in default of gods, it admits the existence of sacred things, namely, the four noble truths and the practices derived from them.[65]
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
States what Profanity is.
That is, indeed, the greatest profanation and dishonor of the divine name. Furthermore, also when men, by swearing, cursing, conjuring, etc., grossly abuse the holy name as a cloak for their shame. In the second place also by an openly wicked life and works, when those who are called Christians and the people of God are adulterers, drunkards, misers, envious, and slanderers. Here again must the name of God come to…
Martin Luther, Martin Luther's Large Catechism
States what Profanity is.
However, this was the sexual domain of childhood, where the imagination fancied a cloaca, so to speak, within which the sexual elements were either badly or not at all differentiated from the excrementitious.[39] In the whole mental domain of the psychology of the neuroses, the sexual still includes the excrementitious, and it is understood in the old, infantile sense. The smutty joke is like the denudation of a…
Sigmund Freud, Wit and its relation to the unconscious
States what Profanity is.
Related ideas
- Eastern Orthodox Church
- Substance abuse
- Epilepsy
- Cantonese
- Jesus
- Fascism
- Gospel of Matthew
- Hindi
- Hate speech
- Indo-European languages
- Imperialism
- Radical politics
- Judaism
- Latin
- The Guardian
- Mental disorder
- Limbic system
- Historical Vedic religion
- Aphasia
- Western world
- Freedom of speech
- Nervous system
- Old Testament
- Oxford English Dictionary
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of language.