Check this out: the following is a tiny selection from the list of “bad words” that VIPER, the guestbook program I use for this site, is preset to watch out for. Hmm, let’s see if we can find a trend here.
———————————————
! WARNING !
———————————————-
English Badwords
The following lines contain rude words and expressions !
analdrilling, arsebandit, arsehole, arsejockey, arselicker, arsenuts, arsewipe, assgrabber, asshole, assfucking, assfuck, assrammer, assreamer, asswipe, badass, bastard, beating the meat, beef curtains, beef flaps, biatch, bitch, bizzach, blow job, boobies, boob, boy love, breasts, buggery, bullshit, busty, butt pirate, buttfucker, carpet muncher, carpetlicker, clitsucker, clit, cock sucker, suck my cock, cock, cockpouch, cracka, crap, cum, cunt…
Trust me, it goes on from there. Heck, this is just the ABC’s.
First off, it’s downright hilarious. Personally, I think “arsejockey”, “beef curtains”, and “butt pirate” are my three favorites. Not that these words would ever come out of my mouth, mind you. They’re just fucking funny.
On a more constructive note, there’s lots of interesting cultural issues we can talk about in regards to this list - which, in all fairness, is really just a random sample of all such lists and the mentality behind them. On the simplest level, they’re designed to keep things “appropriate”, aka non-sexual (Sorry VIPER, wrong website.). On closer examination, they raise a lot important points. One, the vast majority of our English “bad words” and curse words are actually sexual in origin. Two, our sexual words are amazingly abundant. And three, what we fear most, what we consider most important to censor, isn’t racism or hatred (While the word “nazi” does appear farther down the list, so do twelve different variations on the word “vagina”) but common discourse on sexuality.
Clearly, we’ve codified sex and sexually confrontational language as bad, whether by changing its meaning to that of an insult, or merely by associating it with low culture and “inappropriate” thoughts/behavior/comments. The sex taboo, or at least the taboo of speaking openly about sex, has permeated even our casual speech. Just think about what it means to be “fucked” (thank you, Angela Carter). Yet, at the same time we turn our moral backs on such language, we show it, linguistically, the highest respect simply by generating so many words. As much as we (well, at least some people) would like to believe we’re above sex banter, we continue to generate more and more terms. Something truly unimportant to us would warrant only a minimal number of words. Like zucchini. How many ways do you know to say zucchini?
In the end, we have something of a love/hate, dare I say sadomasochistic relationship with our selves and our proclivity for “bad words”. We love them, but we hate that we love them. We’ve turned them into hateful things, and given us an excuse to hate ourselves.
What does any of this have to do with gaming? I could note how often language like this is thoughtlessly (as in literally without thought to its meaning) used in video game web forums. For now, however, I’m just going to play the “gamers are part of larger American culture” card, and bask in the side-splitting glory of “arsejockey”.
October 6th, 2005 at 2:41 am
Every society has been dominated by the brith-sex-death cycle in religion and philosophy. I think we just have the unlucky fortune of being dominated by a religiosity-based morality and legal code which engenders sexuality as an evil. A necessary evil–one to be controlled and made holy only through active communion in the word of an almighty–but an evil nonetheless. Almost the entirety of the Judeo-Christian tradition is dominated by sex. Celibacy–which infantilizes the sexual male, holy virginity–which infantilizes the sexual female, and original sin–which infantilizes everyone but has been also twisted into a male-chauvinist domination scheme–all come together to convey the sense that not only are humans weak and the ways of the flesh inherently wicked, but that our entire lives must be spent in constant, internal battle against the beast within else you will forever burn in the fires… blah blah blah. While such notions may have began as a way to teach us to withdraw from the animal and address the human before acting, the way has become so twisted and corrupt by the desire to seize power that the opposite effect has occurred. By denying sex everywhere, we have made absolutely certain that it will be on everyone’s mind everywhere. I’m of the firm belief that until the stigma of sexual activity is purged and people just lighten the fuck up once in a while about who can fuck who and when they can do it that many of those words would fall into disuse or simply become comedic (even unintentionally ;) ) relics of a land less enlightened. Instead, we strengthen the beast by caging him, denying him food and then clubbing his children a few times for good measure. It’s this irrational, all-consuming fear of ourselves that lifts sex out of the darkness only to find it has no place to go but into the obscene. The more obscene it becomes, the more we fear it. The more we fear it, the more obscene it becomes. We turn sex into a line to be crossed. On one side is purity, on the other side is sex. If you’re already impure by having had sex, what’s the point in holding back? What’s to keep you from sinking every into greater realms of depravity?
It’s so completely ridiculous that we’ve turned it into a binary. It means that one is always faced with the first sexual encounter as something which will take them all the way from the white and place them all the way in the black. No wonder we have so many “dirty” words that are sexually related. There’s literally nothing worse that you can do to a person than to have ungodly congress with them. After all, you’re sending them to hell. They’re fucked.
Apparently The Inuit language has approximately 15 lexemes for snow (last I read, anyway).
October 6th, 2005 at 6:22 am
Well, I’ve heard that for the Inuits, snow is pretty damn sexy. So that explains that. ^_^
October 6th, 2005 at 9:40 am
hahaha! :D … if that’s the indicator of sexual fascination, then I hope they have far fewer words for sled dog.
October 6th, 2005 at 11:08 am
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_297.html
October 6th, 2005 at 11:30 am
When completed, this sentence will proclaim: “Look at all this freaking snow.” At present it means: “Observe the snow. It fornicates.” This is not poetic, but it is serviceable, and I intend to employ it at the next opportunity.
That made Scott and me laugh like idiots for a good two minutes straight. Thanks for the link! Though I admit I have heard tell that the whole “fourteen words for snow” bit is really just an exaggeration/simplification/whatever, and somehow racist against the inuit, as opposed to “eskimo”, people. Who knows…
Matt, you raise a really good point, that, since we associate automatically with the bad, since we repress it and consider it sinful, the language that surrounds it follows suit. Your discussion itself, to me at least, is almost more interesting however. You spend a good amount of time talking about how repressed and suppressed sexuality is in our culture. I’ve been spending some cosy nights with Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality lately (I’m in a class on the subject at the moment.), and he argues that in the last three hundred years we’ve moved from being turned on by sex, to being turned on by the idea of sexual repression. Sex, in and of itself, is only so interesting. The repression of sex, and the modes we use to go about uncovering it, make things far more fascinating. It gives us an excuse to use discourse to uncover sexuality. Like what we’re doing here. Just something to ponder…
October 6th, 2005 at 3:26 pm
The Straight Dope is funny, but they also ruthlessly research all their answers. Like the column says, the way their language is structured, you could come up with a thousand ‘words for snow’ if you spent enough time at it.
October 6th, 2005 at 5:05 pm
Huh, I’ve never thought about it that way (in regards to your reference of Foucault’s book).
I can’t ever think of anything that I was forbidden from exploring or knowing that didn’t result in my actively exploring or researching it. What is forbidden is automatically exotic, I think, and springs forth myths of its own. For sex, I think those myths spring into form as pornography.
October 7th, 2005 at 8:13 am
For sex, I think those myths spring into form as pornography.
How so, Matt?
October 7th, 2005 at 11:38 am
Yeah, I guess I wasn’t very specific :)
I mean that the things that are unknown or are mysterious to us naturally stir the imagination–particularly if they are Verbotten. I’m theorizing, I suppose, that much in the way people create myths and believe in them in order to explain the non-understandable workings of the universe, pronography is a “myth” of sex–a myth that carries all the baggage of sex being perceived as an impure and corrupting act. Sex can’t be in the same room as love because sex is evil. Mechanical, bestial and primal. Porn.
I don’t mean to imply that porn is “wrong” or should be banned or something, just that it’s a popular, mythical outlet the springs forth from our persitently supertitious ideas about sex. If our culture were far more sex-positive I don’t think we’d see less porn, but that it would certainly be of higher quality :p
October 7th, 2005 at 1:15 pm
I see (I think.). You’re saying that, in the same way myths compartmentalize the unexplainable and the unconfrontable in order to make them more managable, porn removes sex and the guilt we carry with it and places it into a contained, distinctive space, one that we can tuck away as if separate from our “meaningful”, emotional relationships.
October 7th, 2005 at 2:01 pm
Worded much, much better, but yes :)
November 11th, 2005 at 5:27 am
A bit late to the debate, but I’d rather say that the vast corpus of sexual vocabulary have to do with the fact that we inject a lot of our sexual desire (i.e: desire as an energy) as fuel to other social activities.
As some ethnologist noted (I think it was Claude Levi-Staruss) there’s nothing as homo-eroticised as the actual process of distributing women among men.
Think of the vocabulary of confrontation: you “fuked” your defeated opponent… intersesting when you compare with the way some other mammals deals with confilcts of power (the winner actualy sodomise the loser, see with dogs). Human males do not do it anymore, they’ve learned to channel the sexual urge that was used to fuel confrontational desire into words, much more economic.
In a way, I can’t but think that’s part of why homosexuality is so decried: the energy that should have been used to advance/protect community has been used for personnal pleasure only (see how, I think in Foucault’s Les Anormaux, the extreme devellopment figure of the monster becomes the masturbator…).
Anyway, this won’t explain everything, but I think it might prove a useful tool.
November 11th, 2005 at 9:49 am
In some human cultures though, sodomy has been used as you describe. In ancient Rome (not really that ancient, when you look at the larger scale of things), you could sodomize a man who committed an offense against - or, even worse, force him to perform oral sex on you. You point out a very interesting link, one that derives anxiety and “badness” from homosexual energy instead heterosexual. Considering the current stance of our society on homoeroticism, that would sure make sense.