I personally know quite a few people who are offended by foul language.
What constitutes foul language may be cultural but that's beside the issue. Imagine, a child from 1950s American suburbs was raised in that belief that certain words were wrong to use. The child was consistently reinforced in this belief throughout his childhood by all adults he met but never had it explained to him. Later, as an adult, he finds many friends who swear freely, and, not knowing the reason it is supposedly wrong, adopts the practice himself. Yet, in the back of his mind he still remembers his entire childhood telling him it was wrong and he know that those people genuinely believed that it was wrong. Clearly there was a reason for this taboo to begin, but without knowledge of the reason, how is he supposed to know whether it is still relevant? It doesn't matter whether there is any intrinsic property of the words that is wrong, what matters is thet there is a taboo and whose to say that the taboo isn't still relevant?
Teaching kids not to swear as a rule is especially important when one remembers that there are still places in society where the taboo holds strong and for the children to succeed in those places, they must not accidentally say anything that will offend someone.
Keeping a taboo when the underlying reason for it has gone away tends to be detrimental for society. I saw a wonderful documentary recently called "Born rich" (I highly recommend it, amongst other things from it I finally learned why there are a number of US personalities whose educational background seems so at odds with their outward demeanour. It's that the privileged simply can't get chucked out of a University, no matter how poorly they perform.) in which one of the interviewees was worrying about whether it was OK to have taken a group of her Jewish friends to lunch at her club, and speculating that it certainly would have been frowned upon had they been black.
I've no idea whether this taboo she transgressed is real or not. I'd certainly suggest it shouldn't be, it's the kind of prejudice you giggle at when you read it in the popular literature of the 30s and 40s. However, if it isn't real, the mere concern over it in the mind of the members keeps them from expanding their cultural horizons. It has become a permanently inhibiting fear, without any real referent.
In short, if you suspect a taboo is no longer culturally relevant you should probably consider yourself to have a duty to break it to get it out of the way as quickly as possible.
"In short, if you suspect a taboo is no longer culturally relevant you should probably consider yourself to have a duty to break it to get it out of the way as quickly as possible."
If your goal is change society, maybe. But, if your goal is to succeed within a society, then maybe not. Some taboos begin for good reason and just because you suspect that they're not relevant doesn't mean that they're not.
I would suggest that if you suspect that a taboo is no longer relevant, you have a duty find out for sure and learn why it ever was in the first place.
Hmmm; agreed. Some of the obscenity taboos aren't quite so brain-dead, either, at second glance. Sure, "cunt" and "vagina" aren't at all the same word, but I wouldn't say that if my web developers co-workers used the word "vagina" constantly that would be just fine.
As we're living in a reality where, you know, rape and suchlike happens fairly frequently, if I were a woman in a mostly male workplace and the word vagina was constantly bandied about, is it wrong that I'd feel uncomfortable?
Or say I was a middle-school math teacher who wrote all of his word problems in the form "so, one vagina is moving at 12 miles per hour due east, and...".
Talk is a step towards action, and it does matter what people say, as we are led to imagine them carrying out related actions, and we often assume (rightly or wrongly) some level of intent behind speech.
Maybe that's part of the reason behind some of the taboo words? Not to discount, of course, the unreasonably deep cultural discomfort with sex... but just, you know, tread lightly if you want to accelerate taboo expiration.
And it doesn't so much explain "shit", but that's possibly related -- I don't really want a discussion of poo-poo during lunch, for example, and there are very logical reasons that it might spoil my appetite (I'd rather focus my imagination on this delicious steaming burrito, thank you very much).
What constitutes foul language may be cultural but that's beside the issue. Imagine, a child from 1950s American suburbs was raised in that belief that certain words were wrong to use. The child was consistently reinforced in this belief throughout his childhood by all adults he met but never had it explained to him. Later, as an adult, he finds many friends who swear freely, and, not knowing the reason it is supposedly wrong, adopts the practice himself. Yet, in the back of his mind he still remembers his entire childhood telling him it was wrong and he know that those people genuinely believed that it was wrong. Clearly there was a reason for this taboo to begin, but without knowledge of the reason, how is he supposed to know whether it is still relevant? It doesn't matter whether there is any intrinsic property of the words that is wrong, what matters is thet there is a taboo and whose to say that the taboo isn't still relevant?
Teaching kids not to swear as a rule is especially important when one remembers that there are still places in society where the taboo holds strong and for the children to succeed in those places, they must not accidentally say anything that will offend someone.