This is unintentionally revealing of the West’s changing linguistic taboos.
As I understand it, a thousand years ago the worst linguistic transgressions were religious, involving words like “God”, “Jesus” and “devil”. Then, in the premodern period, that became pretty innocuous and the taboo shifted to words concerning disgusting bodily functions, “shit”, “piss” and so on. And then in Victorian era it was sex, female virtue, prostitution, all of which remains at the heart of the slang action in the Romance languages. To protect sensitive souls, I will not spell them out.
And in today’s post-modern Anglosphere, all of that stuff is now utterly anodyne. The most terrifying words are now all about group identity. And of course here the taboo is now so absolute that the context doesn’t even matter, I would be banned for even typing the letters.
This is unintentionally revealing of the West’s changing linguistic taboos.
As I understand it, a thousand years ago the worst linguistic transgressions were religious, involving words like “God”, “Jesus” and “devil”. Then, in the premodern period, that became pretty innocuous and the taboo shifted to words concerning disgusting bodily functions, “shit”, “piss” and so on. And then in Victorian era it was sex, female virtue, prostitution, all of which remains at the heart of the slang action in the Romance languages. To protect sensitive souls, I will not spell them out.
And in today’s post-modern Anglosphere, all of that stuff is now utterly anodyne. The most terrifying words are now all about group identity. And of course here the taboo is now so absolute that the context doesn’t even matter, I would be banned for even typing the letters.
Interesting.