Swear-Word Hypocrisy | A Beginner's Guide to Etymology & the Power of the Word | Part 3

Disclaimer:
This post contains harsh language. If you have a problem with that, it was written especially for you <3

When I came to the US for my highschool year I noticed many peculiar things I found weird and hypocritical about America. Things that most Americans around me had long accepted as part of their regular culture and customs without paying much attention.

One of these peculiar things is the supposed ban of using certain swear words in the public arena. High school administrations, radio stations as well as TV programs - I was told - have certain regulations where people are forbidden to use specific swear words, and that it would not be smart to do so.

The hypocritical thing about it is that everybody seemed to use them - all the time. I had never heard as many shit's and fuck's in such a short time, until it became somewhat normal to use them for any situation - even for a foreigner like myself. Don't get me wrong, we do swear in Germany as well, especially in adolescent years. But in the US it was a completely different level for me!

Sometimes they were meant as praise and declaration of interest: "Fuck me, she is beautiful". Sometimes they were used after having stepped on something: "Fuck, that hurt!"
Other times it would be used as advice to not care too much about this, that and the other: "Dude, just fuck it, it's not even worth it"

In Europe we have similar arrangements, but it really jumped out at me in the US because of the frequency and normality with which these terms were used all day long, by the guys in my sports team, by pretty much all of the girls that were trying to be eerily hardcore swearing whenever they could in high school and hoping to "get away with it", even by the sports coach who then would quickly tell us that he "didn't choose the right words just now", and that we should also refrain from using "the F-word" on the soccer field when playing an enemy team, and should use the term "FUDGE" instead... :)

I started wondering about swear words and the implications of a broad societal ban of using them in public, despite their common use in almost any less public situation. This is when I really noticed that it isn't actually about the words at all. Or at least, not having enough grounds to call him out for it because "crap" technically wasn't on their blacklist.

What makes a swear?

To the Americans around me it was rather simple: The word does. "Just don't use those words in school man, or you'll get in trouble"

So I started to experiment and to observe more closely what actually happens with these few "forbidden" but ubiquitous terms.

One of the first great aha moments came through my host brother Phil. He would FORCEFULLY throw the word "CRAP" around, all the time. At home, in school, at family meetings. Whenever he forgot something, or when something went wrong - "CRAP". "Holy Crap!" when surprised. "That is CRAP" when rejecting something. "That's just a bunch of crap!" when someone in school told him something he wasn't agreeing with. He even did it in class and the hallways with a large smirk on his face, even and especially when teachers and administrators were around. But they just kept walking, apparently not minding his swear at all.

At first I did not know what "crap" meant, I just guessed that it would be something similar to "shit" the way he used it so forcefully. My other host brother and the rest of my host family also used it a lot, as well as many of my high school friends.

The peculiar thing is that they would regularly get away with it in class, right in front of our art teacher. She obviously did not have a problem with the term half as much as with the blacklisted ones, nevermind the fact that to a foreigner it was equally "questionable". It seemed to me they had just swapped the letters but kept the original forcefullness and sweariness of it alive, but suddenly noone cared anymore.

Then I found out that "crap" can ACTUALLY be a substitute for "shit" in the literal sense. People around me would say things like "I have to take a crap!", or "that's crap!", or "dude can you please put all your crap away that's lying everywhere?".

I was confused. So "shit" is totally off limits but "crap" is super alright?

Who makes up these rules anyways, and why is everybody so religiously following them, despite not taking these rules seriously in their private life at all?

The twisted guilt mechanism

This whole story was stepped up a notch when I started listening to the radio with my host brothers or when we would see interviews with random people on TV. It sometimes happened that people would accidentally use the word "shit" on air because it was such a regular term for them, and society's arbitrary rule for these handful of terms would trigger too late in their mind - after they had already said it. And every single time, there was a small argument about it. The caller would always apologize religiously, as if he had just accidentally killed someone or made an irreversible fatal mistake, pleading for forgiveness and testifying to his deep shame to the whole audience.

It was rather weird. Most people I met in America seemed to have such a strong desire to be seen as successful, independent and solid in their behavior and personal choices. But when it came to stepping into these puddles of linguistic societal dogma they all behaved like little children instantly. Like being remote-controlled. Whoever had the misfortune of using the wrong term as it slipped out would have to deal with zealous critics taking the opportunity to pass some blame for quite a lot longer than necessary.

It was odd! And very illuminating.

I started thinking about the effect this would have on children growing up - not about the swear words per se and that they should probably be avoided to not taint the child's vocabulary all too early. No, I was more interested in the effects of the ban, because I was reminded of my own culture and our curious distraction methods whenever a "problematic" term was used in front of children.

I figured out that the potency of these swear words does not necessarily come from the order of letters, or the arrangement of vowels.

The potency comes precisely from the idea that these terms are somehow forbidden.

I could actually witness it sometimes with real people: a parent would use the word "fuck" in conversation with someone and instead of just continuing to talk he would either negate himself, apologizing to his environment for just having used that word "in front of the kids", or - even better - be negated by another adult in the vicinity citing his "deep concern" for the children.

Whenever something like this happened, I noticed that the child did not actually seem to care much about the term in question, at first. But he started to care suddenly, after the energetic mixup-and-apology train had started rolling and random adults would weigh in on the "discussion". It's like everything seemed to be mundane or "boring adult stuff" but then suddenly something here was up that seemed worth paying attention to. Like a bored dog laying on the front porch suddenly noticing a rabbit going by, switching to full attention mode in a heartbeat!

Because all the adults suddenly seemed to pay so much attention to that one ominous word or phrase, might as well take that social snapshot and save that mystery for later exploration ;)

The same on Television. It took very few times for me to realize that if the public wanted to shield children from these terms, it would be best to stop using them all that much in private so they would not be blurted out by sheer habit, or to at least stop apologizing so glaringly and making a 20 second self-battering and guilt-trip session out of it everytime it slipped out of someone's mouth. Children love that kind of stuff, and they will pay attention closely whenever such an energetic hickup by adults can be witnessed.

It demonstrates to the child that - for whatever reason - these words have power. And that it would be smart to remember them, or find out what they are, even when everybody pretends that they are forbidden. Obviously these words are important or adults wouldn't make such a fuss about it.

And then mom says it after she hits her head on a cupboard. Then grandpa says it to an old friend on the telephone. Then the cousins say it after thanksgiving dinner talking amongst themselves.

It became plainly visible to me how the prohibition and the artificial drama that would ensue after someone had used such a word was TOTALLY counterproductive to not teaching kids these words. Then I realized after many more years that this is EXACTLY the reason why there is such a drama culture around using these common terms to begin with. Because it makes them exciting. Prohibition artificially inflates the importance of whatever is being prohibited.

We have effectively elevated these terms to god status because we must pretend that we don't use them, and we must shun others endlessly after having used them in a public capacity, nevermind the fact that we ourselves use them all the time.

It reeks of herd-mentality, especially because noone I have ever met in the US could explain to me WHY exactly these terms are bad. If anyone would have said plausibly that these terms actually have a negative effect on people's own health, that they would invite negativity into your life, that they would be a curse or some other ("intangible, superstitious") effect: at least then there would have been some reason.

What I witnessed though was a supposedly "VERY IMPORTANT" public custom, that nobody could believably justify to me after I had mentioned to them that the prohibition of these terms might be the very problem they want to solve, not banning the terms as such. If you don't want kids to use these don't use them. And don't make such a big scene when these terms are used by accident. Kids notice these energetic changes much better than most adults, that much I knew even back then long before my first psychedlic experiences.

The lesson here was that prohibition need not be tied to a physical item or a certain line of occupation. It can just as well be incorporated into everyday language and propped up enormously by enforcing artificial bans on specific terms.

Considering how sexual the American culture is it seems to be most schizophrenic and unhealthy to ban words that largely relate to sexuality or functions of the body we publicly pretend do not exist. It keeps the odd fascination of these terms alive, and will produce a culture that is literally obsessed with these things because they are not allowed to be, officially.

At the same time the US is the most sexualized place I have ever gone, it was kind of freaky actually. Here we are sitting in a high school cafeteria where people have to constantly watch their mouth to not use the word "fuck" when all they want to do is have sex with the cheerleading squad and talk about it openly when they think no authority figure is listening, bragging about how awesome "last night's fuck" was with some "bitch" down the road. I have met many girls in that time who were equally blunt talking about guys, telling them to their face what they want to do to them. It was very peculiar but it struck me as somewhat normal over there, compared to Europe. Which was all the more reason to wonder about this blatant ban of words referencing sex in the public realm.

I should really investigate the role of the FCC and how this all came about. And again: In Europe we have similar taboos in language, it's just that being a foreigner in the US I could notice it so much more easily due to its intensity.

This is only one of the areas in life where we have willingly submitted to some arbitrary rule that seems to exist only officially, while we can witness all kinds of sexualizing trends happening in an official capacity as well, all the time, at an increasing rate. We are told it is bad, but then we are confronted with more hypersexualized media pushing us mercilessly into that same "forbidden" direction regardless.

It amplifies cognitive dissonance to a stellar level. Which will only add to the confusion of what it means to live and to grow up in "civilized society".

It reminds me of pumping too much air into a balloon. There will come a time when it has to pop and all that artificially pent-up energy will have to explode because we have been wanting to explore these areas but were never quite allowed to express them through the words our culture provided us.

Read more of this series:
Part 1 - Basics of Etymology
Part 2 - Authority of Interpretation

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