Why do we have words that we “aren’t supposed to say”? What decides what makes a swear word a bad word?
It can’t be meaning, because “poop” is fine and
“shit” is not. Or “sex” or “ruin” is fine, but “fuck” is not.
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History of English profane words. When the French took over the British aisles, the language mixed with the local germanic language. Over time, a weird language called English started to take shape. As it evolved, Old English preferred many of the germanic words. Scitte (shit) was used for diarrhea. Fuck is also most likely germanic that derived from the germanic word for fist. Ass is Celtic origin. Cunt, whore, bitch, those are germanic.
But many of the words that replaced these words are of the French language. The French rulers wanted people to use their language instead of their native language. In order to offend these French people, some Anglos would use words from their native tongue like shit, bitch, cunt, whore, etc that would really offend them.
As English progressed, we adopted a lot of French words, but still kept these other words in our back pocket to offend people. Diarrhea is the proper way of saying shit. We adopted the word female from the French, so we can just say a female dog instead of bitch (though we still say it for dog shows). Prostitute is more proper than the vulgar cunt. And promiscuous is better than whore. All these proper forms came from the French. And only really poor, uneducated individuals would continue to use these words unironically until i believe the 1600s. And when we use the germanic counterpart to certain words, it signals an intention to offend or signals an uncivilized unintelligent person.
Some words like fuck and dick come up later. Dick is probably a cuss word because it’s referring to the penis in an informal manner. Fuck is germanic, but appeared in the 1400s I believe and possibly came from fist (maybe like fisting?)
TLDR: French took language over. Anglos used some words from native tongue to offend. Time progressed, only uneducated people used these words or people wanting to offend others. Because of this history, alot of these words are to this day considered vulgar. Very basic and simplified but yeah, that’s why they exist
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