the etymology of profanity

since the beginning of time, or human civilization for that matter, society has marked a number of certain words as "unsuitable for a decent person". that list of words varies from civilization to civilization, country to country, language to language, and dialect to dialect. these days you may know some of them as, and i do not censor them, "fuck", "shit", "ass" (to some extent, and when referring to the buttocks), "damn", and the show of rudeness that requires no spoken word, the middle finger.

one can only wonder how they came to be profanities in the first place, as even the rudest of words have a benign origin. for example, we all know that the word "ass" can refer to the donkey, the word "bitch" is the name for a female dog, and you may not know it, but the word "fuck" has its roots in old english (yea, i say, wikipedia does the rest). knowing these facts, it can be assumed that sometime in history, someone in authority branded such words as heretical, derogatory, and whatnot.

what ticks me off is the impact they have on the teachings of the Church. (yes, here i go rambling about religion again. everything seems to amount to it, doesn't it?) i used to go to confession and say that one of my sins was to use profanity, and looking back, i don't exactly see anymore how profanity could be so harmful to one's faith.

a "bad word", alone, is merely an expression of emotion. the thing we have to remember about profanity is that it is not God who brands such words as indecent, but in fact, society who does that job. for example, the word "pussy" originally referred to a cat, right? it wasn't until the modern times that it came to refer to a woman's genitalia. or, if you wish for a less crude example, the word "Jew" became derogatory after world war II, when the word is obviously used to refer to a Jewish person. who started that "Jew" trend? weren't the Nazis responsible for that? Hitler is just a member of a society, just like you and me.

my point is, profanities are not inherently bad. they are bad because it's what society makes of them, meaning, other people just say that they're bad because it's what they were taught. while, okay, maybe i just wrote this so that i have something to justify myself with whenever i curse, although i think that this is something that hasn't been really well thought-out by many.

so in closing, i'd like to say, peace out, bitches.

grieving for the skies

lately i've been playing ff9 on the ps2, and that revived my interest on certain final fantasy oldies. since i know i'm not going to play perennial favorite final fantasy tactics any time sooner, i decided to read the game script and relish in its dubious and bountiful plot twists.

it also contains many different takes on issues and ideologies, usually involving class, human manipulation, politics, religion, etc etc.

so allow me to post an insightful snippet.

Wiegraf: Hya, ha, ha. So much for 'God's miracle'. Governments
falsify history only so it favors them. But you can't blame
them. Because people always hope for a 'miracle'. Endlessly 
complaining, lazy, nuisances... that's what the masses really 
are. Governments give the people what they want...and history 
repeats itself. Governments might well have taken advantage of 
their insecurity.... But then again, people are satisfied
being used.

i know it doesn't make much sense without knowing the context, so forgive me on that. if you want to read the whole thing, just look up "final fantasy tactics" in GameFAQs and look for the "game script" FAQ. (i can't directly link to it.)

back to downloading the ff9 soundtrack. nobuo uematsu is a genius.

you can "keys" my ass

just when i thought i'd have a topic drought within the next few weeks. the news is such a wonderful thing.

part of tonight's entertainment news (both kapamilya and kapuso) is about, hence the title, keys me and its singer, alyssa alano. okay, it's mostly about the singer and how she sung it and less about the song itself. she says, instead of hampering her singing career (or lack thereof), the infamous youtube video (i don't know the URL to it as of this moment) has actually helped her confidence.

i say, "wtf?"

despite the saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity, i'm going to go out on a limb and declare this as HORRIBLE publicity. not just for the aforementioned viva hotbabe who murdered sixpence none the richer, but for the state of the english language in this country. i've rambled on and on about poor english in the philippines, and i swear, this does not help anything.

i guess she displayed a positive attitude by actually raising her head after the fall, but this is the kind of thing that damages a country's reputation. this is the kind of thing that no one should benefit from; this is the kind of thing that should be eradicated from the memory of the public, apologized for, and immediately rectified. shame on you, alyssa alano. shame on you. thanks to the popularity of youtube, the rest of the world may be likely to brand filipino singers as people who butcher foreign songs.

simply put, we shouldn't gain anything good from things like this, save for a message to do something about the state of the english language in this country.

in other news, manny pacquiao is ranked #1 among the veterans. despite being a sellout, one cannot ignore the fact that he still owns. also, ABS-CBN seriously needs to find a way to resurrect the body of ernie baron, since that new guy doing the weather doesn't exactly spell ratings like the walking encyclopedia did.

ooh. i guess i still have it :))

280th

the other day, wowie asked me why i haven't been updating this [blog] anymore. i told him i ran out of topics. aside from coming back home, which i already covered in my LJ, what is new that could be blogged about?

there will be more "bloggable" stuff that are bound to happen, i guess. until then i'll leave you all with a simple thought: every day is a battle.