A Tangent About Swearing

[writerkit]

siderea posted this essay about Putin and the names Ukrainians are calling him, in which she makes an aside comment about how English has "worn profanities smooth by frequent use"-- ie, English doesn't have any words that are shocking just because they're profanities.

Which as someone who was raised not to swear, I have noticed! Swearing is much less horrifying than my mother implied, and people generally don't get upset about. Yet I still don't do it that much-- for more or less this reason. You see, my philosophy of swearing comes from a Royal Diaries book. If you're not familiar with Royal Diaries, it's a children's series done as the teenage diaries of various female historical figures. The one I was reading is Elizabeth I.

In it, swearing is present as "round oaths" which Elizabeth is very clearly not supposed to say, or even know, and she comments that one cannot use them too often or they wear out and lose their power, which I took to heart and thus swear only very rarely.

Now, this doesn't mean anything if I happen to do it in front of people who don't know me that well. But I managed to utterly shock benign_cremator once, when I used the f-word to emphasize just how upset I was, and he stopped dead in his tracks as we were crossing the street because we'd been dating for several years at that point and it was the first time he'd ever heard me swear.

So there's an interesting sort of coda to English-and-profanities, which is that if you, personally, don't do it often you can kind of get the shock factor back among people who know you well enough to be paying attention.