It must be those courses in sociolinguistics influencing me. But I don’t think any words need exclusion from our language. Take naughty words, for instance. There is a history of “bad words” in English deriving from non-obscene words standing in for words considered dirty.
A friend of mine at UPS decided that the word frick was a non-dirty substitute for fuck. Of course, people running around saying frick, this, and that all the time made it pretty obvious what was going on. Frick eventually became just as unacceptable as fuck.
I messed up a relationship with a very proper young lady by pointing out to her that the current “dirty” word used to describe a woman’s sexual organs derived from an earlier word for a rabbit – a cunny. But of course, cunny became contaminated by association and eventually became just as crude as its predecessor. She decided that I was hopelessly obscene and not someone you could take to meet Mother.
I didn’t make myself popular with another girlfriend by insisting that the way we said words could make them obscene. It was not a very close relationship. And it was fated to early failure. I was slapped for reading a menu to her using suggestive gestures and pronunciation. What you can do with facial expressions, gestures, and suggestive pronunciation is fantastic! But be prepared for the consequences.
By the time my primary occupation as an applied anthropologist got underway, I had learned my lesson and reconciled myself to leaving those particular areas of sociolinguistics unexpressed. It was a wise choice.
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I don’t know if George Carlin would be appalled or pleased with his ‘7 words you can’t say on TV.’
Those were classics!
I agree with you. I blame the French. We were doing fine with our expressive Anglo/Saxon/Germanic words but OH no. Really, that Latinate word for c@#$ is the one that sounds dirty. I like ALL the words but boy, they do upset people. Qwim was nice, too.
Well, really, the Normans should properly get the blame. But Raymond Firth had a classic anthro article that talked about how people would substitute clean words for dirty, and gradually, the clean would become soiled. One point is that some things are so important to express and communicate but so puerile that anything connected with them gets soiled.
I only know about English, but I bet there are parallels in other languages and cultures.
Lesson of the story, don’t date prudes?
As a science fiction geek I prefer “frack”, as coined on Battlestar Galactica circa 2004. This begs the age old question, “Which came first, frick or frack?”
I hadn’t considered the Sci Fi angle.