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Q: "Why do so many cursewords and insults in the english language relate to sex and excrement?" --Jillian Johnson |
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A:Well, the obvious answer is that the human race is terminally immature, and even in adulthood, we find something dirty and shameful about poo-poo, pee-pee, and "doing it." The obvious answer, however, makes us all sound a lot dumber than we'd like to think we are. I can assure you that we are a lot dumber than we'd like to think, but that isn't necessarily the cause of our bodily function fetish.
In addition to being largely composed of bodily activities, what are other features of common swear words? Well, they're short, oftentimes just one syllable. They're easy to say. There aren't any swear words that sound like rootabega. Even the multisyllabic swears tend to stick to simple sounds. They need to be easy to handle. You can't be bothered with trying to pronounce something like worcestershire when some bastard cuts you off just so he can beat you to the next red light. Only the best, easiest, most powerful words will do for swear words. How did the best words become the best words? How did words become words at all? Cavemen. Now I don't want to suggest that homo erectus invented English, French, German or even Latin. I do want to suggest that the beginnings of language have some force on the endings. Large portions of our language can be traced back to Latin and Greek, but I'll bet money that those languages weren't spontaneously generated. So let's credit some early group of cavepeoples with the beginnings of language. If you're a caveman or cavewoman, and you're trying to come up with words, where do you start? You could just go through your day, and your list of necessary words might look like this:
Excrement would rank high, not because of time spent thinking about it, but because of time spent doing it. I have a subscription to the Reader's Digest specifically to give myself something to do when I must excrete. Cavemen didn't have this luxury. They pretty much had two options. They could spend their time thinking or they could spend their time not thinking. I'm sure it didn't take long for a thinking moment to arise, and a collection of words arose to describe the situation. The first things to get words probably got short words. No pnoumonoltramicroscopovolkanokoniasis for them. You didn't need big long words, because the short words weren't already taken. In those first weeks, you and your friends come up with the best sounding, most to the point words. Everyone's in a good mood, they're naming things left and right. They have words for sex and pee and poop and stick and rock and cave. Start naming things that are less important, and you end up with words like broccoli. At some point following all this naming, and word inventing people actually start using these words. Words become kind of an every day thing, used to communicate meaning. Some concepts are bound to come up that didn't have words before, and newer words will be invented to fill the gaps. The newer words won't have quite the flair of the older words, but you make do with what you got. Unfortunately, some situations don't allow for compromise. When you smash your hand between two rocks, it just won't do to shout rootabega or cauliflower or anything with more than one or two syllables. Unfortunately for you...you already used up all those words. It seems the best solution would be to allow the best words (the ones you picked first) to serve for multiple purposes. Either that or we, as a culture, never really left second grade. |