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I went the other way with my kids, greatly expanding the scope of curse words. Words are primarily tools of cognition—that is, they are how we hold concepts an
by abtinf 6y ago
I went the other way with my kids, greatly expanding the scope of curse words.
Words are primarily tools of cognition—that is, they are how we hold concepts and use them to reason about the world. When we use words with other people, we are relying on their reason.
Curse words are bad for human life because they don’t mean anything in most contexts they are used.
“Fuck” can mean sex, but usually it’s emoting a non-specific range of emotions (as in “fuck you” or “infuckingcredible”). Most of its meaning comes from the sound it makes—you might as well bark and purr.
The only time a curse word is acceptable is when understanding the emotional state of the speaker is necessary to understand their words, but the speaker is unable to alter their vocal tone in the required manner. Counter-intuitively, this means that curse words may have a valid use in clarifying the meaning of written text. But this is very rare.
Using this standard, all euphemisms for curse words are equivalent in terms of their damage to human thinking—darnit is just as bad as dammit. The only difference is etiquette and manners; one is considered to be much less rude.
- progman32 6y agoInteresting take. Can you explain more about why you hold the opinion that sounds that are meaningless are bad for human life, to the point of being unacceptable? In my experience a good sigh or happy noise are net positives.
- abtinf 6y agoCurse words are bad for human life because they seem like tools of cognition, but they aren’t. When used as words, they can only confuse and mislead you. However, sounds that aren’t words can be very useful—they are perceptual evidence that we use in our reasoning. We identify groups of perceptions by differentiating them from other perceptions, integrate them into concepts based on their similarities, and assign words to represent all of concretes of that group. So you have many “noise” experiences from yourself and in human interactions, identify some as happy, and now you have a useful new tool of cognition in the form of “happy noise”. With additional experience, you can refine that into many sub-concepts, like “pleasurable moan”, “contented sigh”, “silly giggle”, and so forth. Curse words are different because they are just noise. If I say “happy noise”, you know broadly what I’m referring to. But if I say the word “fuck”, you have no idea what that word means—you would have to make guesses either based on the surrounding words that have semantic meaning, or based on how I said it using your conceptual knowledge of the kinds of noises. That’s why you see curse words used in every kind of context as undifferentiated noise. With my kids, I tell them that using any word they don’t understand is a curse word. It hurts their own life if they make the noise of advanced words they don’t yet understand, because it introduces ambiguity into their thinking. For more information on the role of precepts and concepts in human cognition, I suggest reading “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”.