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ACLU Sues To Protect Your Right To Swear
The ACLU is suing the police in Pennsylvania for issuing tickets to people who swear. They argue that it is every American's constitutional right to drop an F-bomb. From the article: "'Unfortunately, many police departments in the commonwealth do not seem to be getting the message that swearing is not a crime,' said Marieke Tuthill of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. 'The courts have repeatedly found that profanity, unlike obscenity, is protected speech.'" This is a big f*cking deal.
I was under the understanding that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had already shot down the "disorderly conduct" law that was used to disenfranchise people's rights. It would be nice if the ACLU could come to New York and do the same for our law.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Can somebody explain to me what exactly is bad about swearing?
While words have power, there's some non-small number of folks who believe that words have intrinsic power. As in, for some reason, a particular combination of sounds has some inherent ability to produce effects.
I attribute this to magical thinking, frankly. Believing that profanity is inherently bad is akin to believing that if I say the right faux-latin words and wave a stick at you, I can produce some effect. (Hell, the alternative word "cursing" plays right into that hypothesis)
I think the question is not that certain words are evil, but that profanity can be valuable. This value is lost from overuse.
One of my HS English teachers (roughly) described it this way:
If you call everyone a motherfucker, then everyone is a motherfucker and it doesn't have value.
But if you rarely or never use the word and walk into the principal's office and say "LISTEN HERE, MOTHERFUCKER!" then you're making a point."
Ummmm.... Mindless zombies always damage society. It doesn't matter whether or not they are religious or not. Your argument seems based on the idea that mindless zombies exist only because of religion. This is patently false.
I see the same argument you make all the time, but I see very little logic in it. Mostly it is just an ad hominen fallacy. The problem isn't religion, it's how unscrupulous people pervert/twist it for their own purposes.
I was raised in an extremely disfunctional home. My old man would read a religious author and go off on a tangent. He threw me out of house and whipped pretty severely at age 7 for me for saying that if using dice to play a game is gambling so is using a spinner. He fixated on one idea to the exclusion of same author saying that parents should never attempt to break their children's wills or stifle thought and choice in their children. The author said it was a sin to do that. Now why did he choose the one idea that he perverted into abusing me and completely ignored the ideas that would have kept him from abusing me? Because of religion? That's an insanely stupid suggestion. He did so because of his own warped character. He found what he wanted and stopped there. That's not the fault of any religion. In my opinion it was mental illness. If he hadn't found some type of justification for his actions in one place, he would have found it in another. He chose to be cruel despite everything in his religion that forbade cruelty.
Now, back to society at large.... Take, for instance, the 10 Commandments. All societies would be much more stable if those 10 principles were followed. Crime would cease to exist. Most of societies ills would disappear. Yet, those 10 principles are attacked as being outdated foolishness. Why? Human nature is no different today than it was when those principles were given, and during the times those principles were followed by the Hebrews/Isrealites their society was prosperous, free, and had very little crime.
Other Hebrew religious laws made sure the poor were fed, that servants were given their freedom and debtors were released from their debt every year of Jubilee, that non-Hebrews/Isrealites were treated fairly and humanely, that the Gentiles had the same rights as the Isrealites had. Forgiveness of debt happened once every 49 years. So, say your family hit hard times and had to sell its land. Your family got its land back at the year of Jubilee. So, was that just? Yup. Was it merciful? Yup. Did it keep the wealthy from robbing the poor, and their descendants, of their inheritance? Yup. It was a just system. It was a religious system.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
Let me help, when you use a swear word as an adjective, you miss the opportunity to use an adjective that would help the listener.
Maybe, maybe not. There is a Soviet urban legend about this...
Russian profanities are considerably more expressive than English ones, mainly due to the ability of the language to combine word roots in more creative ways, and rich inflections. Consequently, it is common for people, especially males, and stereotypically lower classes, to substitute virtually all grammatical categories with swearwords, while still retaining the structure of the sentence to the point that its original meaning is understandable.
Now, the legend... the way it goes, the above was very much true in a certain Soviet factory, where workers identified both parts and processes using a rich swearword lexicon. So "this little fuckthing" (which would be a single word in Russian) meant a very specific part, and "fuck it over through the cunt" (again, a single word) meant applying a very specific technological process to that part; and so on.
Which all went well, in fact, until there was a scheduled inspection of the factory by local Party leadership, and the supervisors forbade workers from swearing. That day, the factory stalled, because the workers on the ground could not coherently explain the manufacturing process, much less coordinate it, without resorting to their original lexicon. They simply haven't used the "proper" names of the parts in years or decades - depending on how long people have been working there!
There's also another army-related joke on the subject. As it goes, Soviet officers were taught that, in theory, Soviet army had a disadvantage in battle because Russian words are, on average, twice as long as English words, and therefore orders take twice as much time to give and to understand. However, in practice, this was found to not be a problem, since in combat conditions, Soviet officers would switch almost entirely to swearwords for all their orders, which are significantly shorter, mostly matching English for all practical purposes.
Take it for what you will, though, according to my (ex-Soviet army major, combat service in Afghanistan) father, the army joke is spot on.