Comments Elsewhere

Colloquial language is full of very carefully observed and significant grammaticalization. Also, our curse-word-taboos are getting better: “The increase in public profanity may seem to speak against such a sunny perspective. But what qualifies as profanity? Today, the ‘four letter’ words traditionally termed profanity in American English are more properly just salty. … No anthropologist observing our society would recognize words used so freely in public language as profanity. “At the same time, consider the words we now consider truly taboo, that we enshroud with a near-religious air of sinfulness. They are, overwhelmingly, epithets aimed at groups. Gone are the days when our main lexical taboos concerned religion — with ‘egad’ as a way to evade saying ‘Ye Gods!’ — or sex and the body, as when Americans started saying white and dark meat to avoid mentioning breasts and limbs. “Instead, today the abusive use of the N-word, the word beginning with F that refers to homosexual men and a four-letter word for a body part that can be used to refer to women are considered beyond the pale even in casual discourse, to an extent that would baffle a time traveler from as recently as 50 years ago. . . .”