I is havin' a young 'un. And as part of my newfound responsibility, I'll need to clean up my act. No more having three beers in a single night. No more staying up until midnight playing Scrabble online. No more injecting heroin into my eyeball. Yup, my hedonistic lifestyle's gotta change.
But I don't know if I can give up cursing. As a kid I was defiantly anti-cursing, and said a prayer of apology every time I even thought of a curseword. Nowadays I realize that there is a rainbow of self-expression in those naughty words, and I'm not sure I can live without some of them.
Some can go. "Fuckin'" is usually unnecessary. It adds little more than emphasis, as in "That was fuckin' ridiculous!" You don't lose much meaning by just saying "That was completely ridiculous!" I'm not going to miss that one.
But there are some naughty or slightly naughty terms that are downright irreplacable. For example:
Half-assed: I challenge you to give me a term that conveys the same spirit of obligatory, apathetic endeavor as does "half-assed." "Low-effort"? That doesn't really communicate the requisite disdain for the person in question. "Half-baked"? Again, not enough disdain.
Like most cursewords or terms, it makes no sense when taken literally. Why would something low-effort require just half of your ass, and a full effort require all of it? Are that many pursuits so dependent on the entire use of the ass? (Keep it clean, people.)
But that's sort of the beauty of it. I personally love it when a term is able to communicate something so well despite its literal meaning -- in this case, "concerning a section of the gluteus maximus" -- having so little to do with the meaning that it has taken on in our culture.
This is actually one of the few words involving "ass" that I find to be useful. Americans apparently have an ass fetish, because we affix "ass" onto every word we can come up with: dumb-ass, smart-ass, weird-ass, crazy-ass, etc. As with "fuckin'", little is typically added besides emphasis. (Well, "smart-ass" is kind of useful. I suppose you could say "smart alec" instead. But that smells like one of these lame-ass cleaned-up versions of regular curses, like "Gosh!" or "Geez!" instead of "God!" It's kind of a "letter of the law but no the spirit" thing, you know? It's like, do you really think God's going to be like, "Well, since you didn't quite say the entire word, you get by on a technicality." No, He's going to smite you either way. Everyone gets smoten eventually. So live it up while you can, motherfuckers!)
Bullshit: There are many ways to talk about half-truths, but none really communicates anything similar to what "bullshit" so poetically expresses. "Bullshit" is not just a lie -- it's a whole world of lies, a rich tapestry of falsehood, intended to make the speaker look brilliant and wonderful. In fact, this one professor dude once came on "The Daily Show" hawking his book, called "Bullshit," which explored the rich veins of connotation and denotation captured in this wonderful word. So smart people recognize the value of "bullshit" too. So there.
Again, the literal meaning (bovine waste product) has little or nothing to do with the meaning that it has taken on. And again, a big part the word's utility it wrapped up in the disdain it communicates. I would assume that that's true of every curseword or term. And maybe that's why they're so popular -- we don't have enough clean words in the English language that convey sufficient hatred.
Nigga, please: OK, I never actually say this one. Nor should I. "Nigga" is a word that has a different meaning depending on the race of the speaker. My particular race (white) has such a long and brutal history of using the word as a weapon that I don't know if we should ever be allowed to use it, regardless of our intentions. From our mouths it will always have at least a partial meaning of "you are not even human." That's powerful stuff, and not to be played around with.
But, man, I still secretly wish I could say "nigga, please." It has nothing to do with black people, really. When this phrase is used properly, it's just poetry. It's such a perfect way to tell someone "Look, you're not fooling anyone." But there's more than that. "Nigga, please" has in it the wisdom of someone who's seen it all -- most of it unpleasant -- and has come out the other side not only strong, but strong enough to call out everyone who is obviously full of crap, very publicly, and very rightfully. After you say "nigga, please," everyone is kinda like, "Yeah, you're right! Thank God you said that."
But there is also a little bit of warmth in "nigga, please." Maybe that's the true genius in it. There's a hint of letting the other person in on it, leaving them just enough room to burst out laughing and say "OK, yeah. You're right. I'm full of crap, I'm sorry." Then we can all get on with life.
So where does that leave us? I don't know. I suppose just that cursewords can often capture things that legitimate language just can't, and it's a shame that we can't say them whenever we like. But then, maybe if we did, the words would lose those unique meanings. Maybe they need to be saved for those times when we need to break taboos to get our points across. Hmm.
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6 comments:
Wow, what a perfunctory, going-through-the-motions post. The notion that you can't express yourself adequately without using cursewords is a bunch of baloney. I mean, child, please!
Well, I thought I got across that cursewords have special layers of connotation and denotation that their cleaned-up versions do not. In fact, in a larger sense, that's true with almost every word or term in the English language: There are almost no true synonyms, in the strictest sense of the term. There are words that mean similar things, that we call synonyms, but none, or very few, are exactly the same. That's why when you look a word up in the thesaurus, you have to weigh each alleged synonym as to whether it's really what you're looking for. If two words start to mean exactly the same thing, one will probably fade from usage.
And it is awfully strange, I think, that there are some words we've collectively decided are "bad words." Why? Why is "shit" a bad word and "crap" is not? It's arbitrary -- they are very close in meaning. It's not like the general concept is banned from discourse. And there's nothing magical about one combination of letters used to symbolize that concept over another.
Then what I was trying to allude to in the end was a possible answer to that question, that perhaps we set up the taboos so that we can break them. And in the act of breaking them, we can infuse bad words with greater power, which in itself carries additional meaning. If it wasn't a bad word, "shit" probably wouldn't have much of a different meaning that "crap." One of the two might then go into disuse.
So anyway, I think it's a fair post, with some interesting ideas. Perhaps I could have explored them more seriously instead of shooting for shock value quite as much. But I thought that might be dull.
Oh wait, I just got that you used clean-up versions of each of the words I cited. Doi.
I'm totally going to start using "perfunctory" instead of "half-assed." What a charming term!
I think you missed "pissed." "Pissed" is such a sweet little curseword and it meets your criteria of not relating to its true meaning (unless you're saying something like "I pissed away all my savings on Nut Goodies"). Other words just don't convey the same as "pissed." "Angry" invokes a red-faced man shouting. "Mad" is just dull. "Infuriated" is a wimpy, watery way of suggesting fury, which is fierce and frightening. But pissed...man, it's like mad-but-able-to-joke-about-it. How else do you convey that?
Really, though, you don't have to give them up. There's nothing wrong with just spelling out your favorite cursewords. I'm really good at spelling whole sentences (and understanding entire rapidly-spelled sentences) now. I totally wish there were a sentence-spelling competition. I'd enter it.
It is also difficult to convey the uncoolness of something without being offensive (and you can't use the word uncool, because it has its own meaning that is only one type of cool, and not the one I am referring to). Obviously you can't call things "gay" to mean they aren't cool. That's f-ed up. More and more you can't call things "retarded", although it seems as though people with mental disabilities aren't referred to in that way anymore. It's maybe not f-ed up, but it is insensitive. It seems like you shouldn't be able to call things "lame", but no one seems to care about offending people who have trouble walking. It's the only word left, and any day now the lame are going to reclaim it! Also, why is this whole group of descriptors based on marginalizing a group of people?
Boy, now I feel really lame about using "lame." How could I have been so blind to the insensitivity. Gah! Though I imagine any attempts to bring the Lame to the limelight will fall on deaf ears for awhile. It's all just so totally constipated.
Naturally, I've forgotten the words discussed in this post, but "crap-ass" might do. Oh yeah, we're trying to clean up our language. Well, poop.
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