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The general utility of swear words is that they don't. Natural Language is not explicitly constructed, no matter how confidently your favorite dictionary likes
by thomastjeffery 4y ago
The 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?