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In Praise Of ProfanityStock informationGeneral Fields
Special Fields
DescriptionWhen President Obama signed the affordable health care act in 2009, the Vice President was overheard to utter an enthusiastic "This is a big f*** deal!" In 2003, Bono dropped the F-bomb while accepting a Golden Globe, prompting nation-wide debate. A town in Massachusetts leavens $20 fines on swearing in public. Nothing is as paradoxical as our attitude toward swearing and "bad language": how can we judge profanity so harshly in principle, yet use it so frequently in practice? Though profanity is more acceptable today than ever, it is still labeled as rude or at best tolerable only under specific circumstances. Cursing, many argue, signals an absence of character, or poor parenting, and is something to avoid at all costs. Yet plenty of us are unconcerned about the dangers of profanity; bad words are plainly recorded in dictionaries, and are commonly used in mainstream music, Academy Award-winning films, books, and newspapers. And of course, regular people use it in conversation every day. Clearly "dirty words" serve an important purpose. Author descriptionMichael Adams is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at Indiana University, editor of the quarterly journal American Speech, and President-Elect of the Dictionary Society of America. Adams is author of From Elvish to Klingon (OUP 2011), Slang: The People's Poetry (OUP 2009), and Slayer Slang (OUP 2003). Table of contentsn/a |