In most languages, the words now regarded as swear words started off life as normal acceptable words which became "dirty" because of people's perception of what they signified.
In English, for example, words like "c*nt", "F**k", "S**t", etc, were standard anglosaxon words but as society became more refined, it became taboo to use them, and they were replaced in "polite" society either by euphemisms or by latin or Greek words, such as "vagina", fornicate, and "faesces", etc.
I am aware that the same happens in other languages as well; in Spanish, for example, one passage in a book by, I believe, Cervantes,the author of Don Quixote, describes a dirty woman as being "de puto coño", both these words nowadays being taboo in Spanish.
Other words, which began life as slang, tend to change more frequently from generation to generation.
Swear words can originate in other ways as well; the most commonly used swaerword in British English is probably "bloody"; popular folklore has it that this is a corruption of an oath "by our lady", although this is now believed to be fallacious.
The word "bugger", which means either to sodomise or a sodomist, is believed to be a corruption of Bulgarian, and reflects Western Europeans' unenlightened views of that race in former days.
2007-02-27 03:50:34
·
answer #2
·
answered by GrahamH 7
·
0⤊
0⤋