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Whenever my kids would swear I would ask them for a definition of the word. If they didn't have one I would suggest that it was perhaps unwise to use words whos
by c22 4y ago
Whenever my kids would swear I would ask them for a definition of the word. If they didn't have one I would suggest that it was perhaps unwise to use words whose meanings one did not know and leave it at that.
- thomastjeffery 4y agoThe general utility of swear words is that they don't. Natural Language is not explicitly constructed, no matter how confidently your favorite dictionary likes to pretend it to be. Natural Language is full of ambiguity, and we resolve that ambiguity with context. Noam Chomsky famously recognized this categorization as "context dependent grammar". In that same vein, he categorized what we write software in as "context free grammar". He then proved mathematically that we cannot write computer programs in context dependent grammar. Are you children computers or humans? Why should you constrain their language to a lower category?