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.