Shit for Making Websites

They're words. Why are you afraid of them?

> Golly used to be a really serious swear, now it's quaint and old fashioned.

What? Golly was never a "serious swear". That's why it existed in the first place -- because people were afraid of uttering a completely different word.

> You think you are mainstreaming the words by making people OK with offensive words.

This sentence is offensive. Far more offensive than "shit" has ever or will ever be. And not because any of its words are offensive, but because you presume to tell me what I think. And you are very, very wrong.

The idea conveyed is offensive. The words used are irrelevant.

How did you come by the ability to read others' minds and tell them how they think and feel?

Instead you seem to want a world where the message is ignored, the messenger is shot and everyone is offended because he used the word fuck.

I can see where you're coming from, and can respect that, but it still feels to me like this idea that we will just perpetually invent new words that serve the same exact purpose to be a bit of an unconvincing assumption. I have no problem believing that racial slurs will go the way of the dodo eventually for example, so would there be a need to replace such words exactly? Maybe the words themselves will be adapted to fit a narrower/different definition, but the point is that it doesn't matter whether the words themselves stay static or not, because the zeitgeist that produced their meanings won't stay static anyway. So either we'll adapt the old ones to these new meanings, or we'll just resort to inventing new words for these similar/derived concepts when the old words are 'unavailable'.

And even this is still assuming that it is somehow innate for us to 'swear', or that 'swearing' as a concept is even well defined enough to try and do anything with it (like try to avoid it). I mean, if I use the word "fudge" everywhere the classic "F-word" would otherwise be used, why is it then still not considered a swear word? Maybe you could argue that it is, and that's cool, but clearly it carries significantly less of a 'sting' to it. So does it still make sense to lump it in with the other swear words? It just feels too arbitrary and ill-defined of a concept.

I don't disagree that we should reserve some expressions for intense emotions (such as those originally attributed to swearing), but like I said, Context is a key part of the language equation, which itself isn't even all that matters in communication (e.g. vocal intonation, and the whole array of non-verbal communications). Language really can't be considered in isolation, it very much still a product of verbal communication, so you have to take those factors into account too.

Besides, the whole debate about whether language limits thought or thought structures language is still up in the air, so to try and say anything conclusive about something that seems to be a purely linguistic artifact feels a bit premature.