Cover your eyes if cursing offends you.
Plenty of people chose not to swear. Good for them. I only care when they say some judgmental bullshit about how this makes them a better person than me and then act all feigned innocent when they stir up a shit storm.
Beg your pardon, poop storm.
I've heard the hackneyed cliche many times that cursing is the refuge of unimaginative people with no better way to express themselves. Oh REALLY?
I say, why is using the word with a latinate root that means the same thing morally superior to using the germanic or anglo-saxon word? Why would God, for example, who is arguably responsible for all human languages, have a preference in this matter? Unless you assume God is white and speaks English, or you conflate the tradition of church-goers with actual doctrine.
Does it take discipline to remove powerful words from your vocabulary? Sure. Is that a spiritual discipline? As much as refusing to eat potatoes, or chocolate, or coffee for 40 days out of the calendar year. Words have meaning because we agree that they do, not because God with his almighty Bic pen created the English language and then set some words aside as naughty. If we arbitrarily designate germanic-sounding words with hard consonants as "bad words" and stop using them, will that stop us from offending other people or saying or thinking hurtful things? No, of course it won't.
It does take a more powerful imagination than my own to believe censoring 10-20 words in the English language is a valuable contribution to world peace, or to equate expressing pain and frustration with a hearty "Damnit!" with beating a child or killing other people. So maybe, in the end, I lack imagination. But I do get to say what I damn well please and fucking mean it.
Beg your pardon, poop storm.
I've heard the hackneyed cliche many times that cursing is the refuge of unimaginative people with no better way to express themselves. Oh REALLY?
I say, why is using the word with a latinate root that means the same thing morally superior to using the germanic or anglo-saxon word? Why would God, for example, who is arguably responsible for all human languages, have a preference in this matter? Unless you assume God is white and speaks English, or you conflate the tradition of church-goers with actual doctrine.
Does it take discipline to remove powerful words from your vocabulary? Sure. Is that a spiritual discipline? As much as refusing to eat potatoes, or chocolate, or coffee for 40 days out of the calendar year. Words have meaning because we agree that they do, not because God with his almighty Bic pen created the English language and then set some words aside as naughty. If we arbitrarily designate germanic-sounding words with hard consonants as "bad words" and stop using them, will that stop us from offending other people or saying or thinking hurtful things? No, of course it won't.
It does take a more powerful imagination than my own to believe censoring 10-20 words in the English language is a valuable contribution to world peace, or to equate expressing pain and frustration with a hearty "Damnit!" with beating a child or killing other people. So maybe, in the end, I lack imagination. But I do get to say what I damn well please and fucking mean it.