#taboolanguage — Public Fediverse posts

Listening to a podcast this morning, I noticed the phrase mature language used in a content warning. It’s one of many phrases in the form X language, some of them similarly euphemistic, for what we might more plainly call swearing.

In several of these phrases, the modifier identifies the type of content: abusive language contains abuse, obscene language obscenity, profane language profanity, vulgar language vulgarity. But these categories are tricky to define and tend to overlap in usage; the phrases are often used interchangeably.1

Mature language points to the language’s purported unsuitability for minors, as does adult language. Here the modifiers refer more to the speakers or listeners than to the language itself – if anything, the use of ‘mature’ language is commonly (mis)perceived as immature.

While these last two terms signal clearly that swearing is on the way, they also seem at odds with the facts that (1) children are generally familiar with swear words, and (2) arguably more adults than children are bothered by swear words. But those are separate cans of worms.

Still other synonyms, like bad language, coarse language, indecent language, and offensive language, are laced with moral judgement.2 A few convey this through a metaphor of physical hygiene: dirty language, filthy language, foul language. Geoffrey Hughes, in his Encyclopedia of Swearing (2006), writes:

The use of terms like foul, filth, dirt, and dirty to categorize offensive or abusive language is profound and ancient. Anglo-Saxon ful (“foul”) was used to gloss “obscene” as well as “dirty.” “Shit worde,” dating from 1250, is historically the earliest categorization of coarse speech, followed by “foul speech,” recorded from about 1455.

Bad language and foul language in particular are so common as to be used routinely by people who see nothing ‘bad’ or ‘foul’ about it. Swearing’s bad reputation is thus paradoxically spread by people who may enjoy the activity.

It’s hard not to notice the negative valence of these adjectives. Abusive, bad, coarse, dirty, filthy, foul, indecent, obscene, offensive, profane, vulgar – it’s not a flattering list. That’s to be expected, given the social status of swearing and the stereotypes and misunderstanding that accompany it.

Adult and mature buck that trend, though at the cost of accuracy. Explicit is a relatively neutral descriptor, but it’s also pretty broad. Explicit language could mean plain language – which, as it happens, occasionally means coarse or vulgar language, though nowadays it usually refers to intelligibility.

Taboo language is similarly vague. It often denotes swearing, but it can encompass insults as well as forms of word magic that manifest, for example, as name avoidance – be it the name of something sacred or feared, or both, like a bear or a god.

All of which makes strong language a serious outlier.

When I proposed Strong Language as the name for this blog, back in 2014, I felt it had several things in its favour. For one thing, it’s the rare case of X language where the connotations of X are unequivocally positive. And we’re swear-positive here at Strong Language. It’s also search- and preview-friendly – not a given for a sweary blog about swearing.

And it’s a good pragmatic fit: more than any other register of verbal expression, when you swear, you likely feel strong emotion or desire strong effects, or both. Swearing is powerful, potent, forceful language. It is the idiom of strong feeling. It wears this adjective well.

1 Michael Adams’s book In Praise of Profanity has insightful discussion of these categories and their blurry boundaries.

2 One sensible alteration is to recast offensive language as ‘language that some viewers/listeners may find offensive’.

https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2023/07/13/strong-bad-mature-filthy-language/

#comics #euphemisms #language #linguistics #metaphor #naming #phrases #pragmatics #semantics #StrongLanguage #swearing #taboo #tabooAvoidance #tabooLanguage #tabooWords #taboos

Sweary maps 2: Swear harder

You may remember Jack Grieve’s swear maps of the USA. Now he has a nifty new web app called Word Mapper that lets anyone with an internet connection make use of the raw data behind those maps.

Being a mature grown-up, I put on my @stronglang hat and went searching for swears and euphemisms. What emerged were some intriguing – and visually very appealing – patterns of rude word use in contemporary discourse:

About 60 maps follow, so fair warning: It’s an image-heavy post.

Below are heat maps for: af (as fuck), asf (as fuck), badass, bullshit, cock, crappy, dammit, damnit, damned, dang, dick, dickhead, douchebag, effing, fart, freakin, freaking, frick, frickin, friggin, fuck, fucked, fucker, fuckers, fuckery, fuckin, fucking, fw (fuck with), goddamn, gtfo (get the fuck out), heck, idgaf (I don’t give a fuck), lmfao (laughing my fucking ass off), mf (motherfucker/-ing), mofo, motherfucking, nigga, omfg (oh my fucking god), piss, pissed, pissy, prick, scum, shit, shits, shitty, shittiest, shitting, slutty, stfu (shut the fuck up), sucks, swear, tf (the fuck), twat, turd, wtf (what the fuck), wth (what the hell).

If this is your first visit to Strong Language, welcome.

Multiple meanings aren’t controlled for, so the name Dick is mixed in with vulgar dick, innocuous sucks with slang sucks, emotional freaking with intensifier freaking, and so on. The same goes for abbreviations like af, asf, fw, and mf, which allow for other possibilities, but the sweary usages predominate in US tweets.

Before you ask about asshole, bastard, bitch, crap, cunt, damn, darn, douche, faggot, fuckboy, gosh, hell, motherfucker, pussy, slut, or whore, these all featured in my earlier swear-maps post, which also describes the mapping method Grieve and colleagues used. Fuck and shit are repeated here for comparison (shit vs. shitty is particularly interesting) and because the fuck map is pretty asf.

Cocksucker, curiously, doesn’t make the cut. Nor, less curiously, do arse, bugger, wanker and other taboo terms more characteristic of British English. But I’m sure I missed a few – let me know in a comment. You can click on maps for larger images.

In a comment at Language Log, Grieve said the app should map any string of alphabetic characters in the top 10,000 words in the (8.9-billion-word) corpus. He confirmed to me that this will be extended in due course. Multi-word phrases don’t work yet, but will eventually. For hyphens, use full stops (periods).

Grieve hopes to set up Irish and British versions at some point (excuse me while I omfg) and to make other technical refinements. In the meantime, there’s endless fun to be had with the current US Word Mapper, and it’s impressively fast to use. You can even look up non-swearwords, but there’s a time and a place for that kind of carry-on.

https://twitter.com/StanCarey/status/712298240402702336