Asklemmy

45854 readers

1262 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Has anyone else decided not to swear? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

42 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I used to swear a lot. I decided to not swear at all (except for possibly mild swears), instead replacing most swears with minced oaths.

My family is Christian and I would get yelled at for swearing even if it just slipped out. So far, I don’t swear unless I’m feeling a strong emotion or acting impulsively, but I’ll usually say things like “F/eff” or “fudge” instead of the F-word.

I like to be “creative”, so my go-tos are usually “Go fudge yourself”, or “What the cluck?”

I might say “mother lover” instead of MF

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I do not understand the reason for swearing being considered bad.

I do not understand why replacement words are better.

If it were the specific sounds being made that are wrong, replacement words would make sense. However, since other languages have no prohibition on these words and may have words that sound the same/similar to swear words in another language.

If the meaning behind the words was the 'bad' part, then replacing those word with other words that express the same idea would be just as wrong.

Who determines which words are bad? If it's a cultural thing I guess it makes sense but a person is fickle and groups of them even more so. I still don't understand why a group would prohibit specific words but not their meanings (barring superstition, like in the case of the origin of word "bear"). If it were a deity of some kind, it makes me return to the question why specific words in specific languages but not the meaning and intent behind those words.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 hours ago

I'm decently sure profanity became known as such because of either religious reasons or class division (along the lines of peasants vs nobles from early/medieval europe) and it just became commonplace.

I would say profanity nowadays though is a lot less taboo. It's been normalized in culture (hip hop, city culture, punk subculture) and a lot of people are less religious nowadays.