Reddit reviews An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-speaking World
We found 3 Reddit comments about An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-speaking World. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
As a Turkish native speaker, I can highly suggest anybody interested in swearing to research Turkish. Swearing is a kind of art in Turkish. It does not have to be sexual reference. However types of swearing words depend so much on the region. As a strange example, it is only acceptable in Adana city to curse Allah ( Muslim God), however doing so in other city may cause you so many problems.
By the way, you may want to check this book
It depends on of which swear word or profanity one is thinking. In the case of a motherfucker, it is not the frequency with which incest happens, but the fact that it makes reference to incest. In other words, you arguably focused on the wrong element that makes it a swear word.
Otherwise, the general and generic answer is that swear words and profanities depend on time and place, use and customs...culture. Citing Hughes's An Encyclopedia of Swearing:
>Historically, modes of swearing and societal taboos show quite different emphases at different stages and sectors of the same basic culture. It would seem, for example, that feces are universally used in oaths and insults, while sex is used in a culture specific variety of ways, emphasizing, for example, incest in terms like motherfucker in some cultural groupings, adultery in cornuto in others, and a polymorphous variety in the application of the terms for the genitalia. Swearing, however, is also strongly governed by fashion, so that at any given time the current modes are seldom taken literally. Few people now would stop to consider the protean uses of hell in, say, “hell’s bells!,” “the hell it is!,” “to hell with it!,” “I’ve got the hell in with him,” “we drove like hell,” and “we had a helluva good meal.” The point is that these have become established idioms and so cannot be subjected to simple semantic analysis, anymore than can the phrase “come hell or high water.”
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=yR1sZmrIBeoC&pg=PT47&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
This is the book where the argument is made, not saying if he is right or wrong. Geoffrey Hughes is Professor of History of the English Language at the University of the Witwatersand, Johannesburg. He has also written books on the History of English Words, A History of Semantics & Culture, and an Encyclopedia of Swearing.
https://www.amazon.com/History-English-Words-Geoffrey-Hughes/dp/063118855X
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0631158324/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765612313/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1
https://www.amazon.com/Political-Correctness-History-Semantics-Culture/dp/1405152796