The Power and Beauty Of Swearing

Swear words are just words. They have meaning, to be sure, but it's the emotion of the words that cause pearls to be clutched. That's what makes them so fun.

If you like this, please press the ❤️ at the top or bottom of this page, click the 💬 to leave me a comment (I’d love to hear from you), or if you want to go nuts, hit the 🔄️to post this on your own timeline. All of it help helps others find this post, and me find other readers.

---

When I was younger I tried reading the dictionary. I was of the ilk that you could learn anything by reading about it (still am). I thought, what better way to learn words than to read the book about words. It was a Webster's. I got up to somewhere in the J's. That's why I have a brief understanding of juxtaposition, but not so much about kinesiology. I bounced around the pages after that, but never really finished. I know how it ends. Something about a zygote.

Anyway, this is all to say that I love words. I assume you, being a reader and/or writer here on the Stacks, love words too. 26 letters in the English alphabet that we smash together and rearrange in such a way as to communicate just about anything. Words convey more than simply a stream of definitions, but allow a writer to transfer to the reader sensations and significance.

To that end we humans have gone so far as to create different words that have the same meaning because each of those words bring their own vibe to a sentence. We can say “fortress”, “stronghold”, or “palace” but only one of them is where you want to wear your finest jacquard pantaloons and fête your nearest and dearest 500 friends with goblets of champagne and a parade of elephants. Inviting your friends to a stronghold feels more like wanting to hunker down for a nice siege¹.

Each and every word holds its own magic. Putting those words together can make people laugh, cry, or grab a pitchfork. Poetry exists but for the rhythm of words. That we can stimulate someone, across space and time, to...

...pause in their own head just because they’re reading something you wrote is damn near witchcraft when you get right down to it. And, yes, I know that’s more of a punctuation trick than wordplay, but you get what I’m throwing down: words have an intrinsic power to allow the writer to control what the reader is experiencing.

Math may be universal, but language is how we explain math to each other.

All of this by rearranging 26 letters.

AND NOW ABOUT THE SWEARING

There was a time, even not that long ago, where I was gobsmacked that people were still offended by curse words. Expletives are merely an arrangement of the 26 letters after all. What’s the big deal? I thought through more mainstream use and people’s increasing exposure to them they would lose some of their repulsiveness.

I swear all the time mainly because I like the words. I like the energy and potency they bring to a sentence.

Swear words are just words. They have meaning, to be sure, but they also have a lot of emotion. That's what people get so upset about. It's not that they don't care about the definition, it's the emotion of the words that cause pearls to be clutched. These words are beautiful and meaningful, but more than anything they are chock-a-block with emotion. We all appreciate the myriad ways we can use a word like "fuck" yet, more than its easy versatility, is that the word still packs a punch.

That's why expletives are so fun to toss around.

Lately, though, there is a part of me that doesn’t want them to mellow with use. I don’t want people to casually disregard them as colorful filler. Maybe I should better gauge when I whip them out more than I do now. Not because I don't want to offend anyone (sometimes polite company needs a shake up) but because I want these words to remain dangerous. I want them to retain the ability to rip a hole in the space time continuum that is a sentence and leave the reader agasp².

I mean, fuck.

Let me know your favorite curse-phrase in the comments.
(This could get interesting)

1. You said Netflix and chill!

2. We can also make up words willy-nilly. That “agasp” isn’t already a word has me aghast. Also, the definition for “agasp” would be: struck with a lack of breath.