Nine Nasty Words

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
—

What's key is that the stock of curses is ever self-refreshing, The fashions change, as always and everywhere, but what persists is taboo itself, a universal of human societies. What is considered taboo itself differs from one epoch to another, but the sheer fact of taboo does not. Language cannot help but reflect something so fundamental to our social consciousness, and thus there will always be words and expressions that are shot out of the right brain rather than gift-wrapped by the left one.

NINE NASTY WORDS

Nine Nasty Words

:

On that matter of evolution, profanity has known three main eras—when the worst you could say was about religion, when the worst you could say was about the body, and when the worst you could say was about groups of people. The accumulation of those taboos is why “just words” like h

, s

, and n

** respectively harbor such sting.
I don't know how accurate that is, but it kind of makes sense—and it works pretty well as a framework for the book, too.

* The book uses the actual words, I wimped out and elided them.

The chapter headings give you a pretty good idea of what the book covers and shows how the framework is used (with the addendum at the end):

1 D

: English's First Bad Words2 What Is It About F

4 A Kick-A** Little Word5 Those Certain Parts.6 Why Do We Call It “The N-Word”?7 The Other F-Word8 Being in Total Control, Honey!9 A M

**

NINE NASTY WORDS

To understand how language changes without allowing a certain space for serendipity is to understand it not at all.